The State’s New Lifestyle Demons: Tanning and Salt

A lead story in the news this week has been the latest in a series of propaganda pieces on tanning beds: they are bad for you. The story now goes that tanning salons are bad because they attract people with addictive behavioral patterns. Some dermatology study was produced that will become another piece of ammunition for the proposed taxes on tanning.

The title of the piece in the Archives of Dermatology is, “Addiction to Indoor Tanning: Relation to Anxiety, Depression, and Substance Use.” I can’t wait to see the science behind that correlation. Tanning salon customers, it is said, are prone to using drugs, alcohol, and smoking. I guess that’s sort of like saying people who are attracted to Florida condominiums are prone to arthritis, bingo, and aging.

After the government’s long and destructive “war” on the sun, it has been widely reported — even in the mainstream press — that people are lacking in Vitamin D, and the whole obsession with high-SPF sunscreen has been misplaced. The Lifestyle Nazis, for some reason, just hate tanning salons. They hate that people freely make the choice to exchange their cash for time ‘neath the artificial bulbs. I kind of like the argument that the tanning salon tax is racist. Note the dermatologist in the video who states, “The tanning salons know their days are numbered.”

Next …

Lo and behold — yesterday, after months/years of rumblings, the FDA announced its long-term plan for controlling the kind of food you can access.

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

…The legal limits would be open to public comment, but administration officials do not think they need additional authority from Congress.

Legal limits on salt in processed foods. And the FDA has unlimited authority to bypass your (equally totalitarian) elected legislature. One source from the FDA stated that the government’s goal is to change the “embedded tastes in a whole generation of people” ….. by slowly boiling the frog, that is. This will be a 10-year program of gradual totalitarianism, as the Feds work to slooooowly change your personal taste. They will gradually lower the allowed limits on salt and wean you off the “taste.” Excuse me — “embedded taste?” I am being completely objective, here, as I do not ever eat landfill processed foods. But it’s a choice, and no matter how bad a choice, some people choose it.

One of my most hated tyrants in all the land, Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, stated, ”Limiting sodium might be the single most important thing the FDA can to do to promote health.”

Accordingly, we know that this has nothing to do with some great concern for the health of individuals. For the same state that rails against processed food makers enables and subsidizes the foods — processed and agriculture — that have been making Americans obese and disgustingly unhealthy for decades. These subsidies have been luring Americans away from more expensive, healthy, whole foods (that actually take time to prepare) and toward quick-and-easy processed, garbage foods. The salt grab is another control tactic to be used to socially engineer society under the guidance of the self-aggrandizing Central Planners.

Ask yourself this question: after the FDA/Department of Agriculture/Feds limit the amount of salt in the processed foods you buy, what do you do when you cook it at home? Hmmmm, add salt from your salt shaker? Is it really that easy? Yes, that is, until you need a special license to have a salt shaker and buy salt, and jack-booted thugs from the FDA are kicking in your door for a salt shaker search.

Tags: FDA, Thugs