The New York City Board of Health looks like its serious in its efforts to keep New York residents safe from trans fats, the synthetic oil and butter substitutes that do nasty things to our insides. They voted to limit the amount of trans fat per serving in the city's 20,000 restaurants.

Many restauranteurs are upset, of course, in the same way bar owners were ticked off when they weren't allowed to poison their staff with cigarettes, and the way car manufacturers were outraged when they were forced by the government to put in seat belts, air bags, and other life-saving technologies.

OK, so there's a deep philosophical divide here - taking care of the public welfare vs. letting people do whatever the heck they want, regardless of the consequences. I have sympathies on both sides of the debate. After all, when the government thinks it can tell me what is healthy and what isn't, I get nervous. Are they going to make me eat spinach grown with synthetic fertilizer because it now regards manure as potentially lethal? Regulation is a clumsy tool, and the letter of the law is seldom nuanced enough to capture the spirit in a way that bureaucrats understand.

And yet, in the case of the city restaurants, there's a big problem: people are being poisoned without knowing it, and with the tacit approval of the Board of Health. If there were big hairy rats running around the kitchens of New York restaurants, I think even the most rabid libertarian would like to be alerted to that fact before digging in to a juicy steak. Trans fats are arguably worse for public health, just on a slower scale.

It's a problem of transparency and confusion. The junk food industry, like the beef and dairy industries, have friends in high places making policy based on the misleading studies conducted by their friends in academic places. If, as Michael Pollan has suggested in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the feedlots and slaughterhouses of America were built with glass walls, and the public could see the way our meat lives and dies, no legislation would be required. The market would do its job, and meat production facilities that outraged or disgusted the public would have to change or go out of business.

But where is there a possibility of transparency with trans fats and other foodstuffs unfit for human consumption? Trans fats are not dying anti-biotically propped up steer, leaking pus into our milk supply. They are uncomprehensible chemicals, no scarier or unnatural looking to the untrained eye as a molecule of broccoli.

There's common sense, of course, and the wisdom that comes with experience. But the typical eater of the standard American diet is addicted to foods sold by some of the biggest corporations in the world - not exactly a recipe for enlightened self-interest.

So that leaves heavy-handed public health initiatives, spear-headed by strong leaders with political capital to burn, such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Wealthy people in the food industry will cynically raise populist cries of "Food Police," distracting us from the fact that they are "Food Criminals." And when the dust settles and the rational assessments ensue, we'll see that New York City will benefit from having high standards when it comes to what we eat.

And maybe with enough clear evidence, we can loosen up on the regulations and let our food choices be driven by common sense and clear, unaddicted desire.