The Government’s planned war on fast food is not a healthy option

I’M having a Greta Garbo moment: I just want to be left alone. Apparently, Minister for Health Dr James Reilly is seeking New York-style public health legislation in an effort “to stop the epidemic of cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic lung diseases and diabetes, which kill three in five people” — as if we don’t all have to die of something.

Health Department officials have, according to reports, been in contact with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to see how — shades of the tobacco ban — the Big Apple reined in the fast food giants. The minister is also following the British precedent and writing directly to all fast food companies in Ireland asking them to label all their menus with the calorie content.

Dr Reilly is swimming with the tide. It is the height of fashion to hate McDonald’s and KFC, to finger the Golden Arches and Colonel Sanders for every social ill from obesity to twisting of children’s minds to the devastation of local communities. It’s a kind of moralism suffused with anti-capitalism and a dose of anti-Americanism masquerading as concern for health.