With the city expected to enact its trans-fats ban today, the Times' rather bizarre piece on the campus movement for fat studies and fat rights from last Sunday (no idea with this was in the fashion section) makes for a (granted unintentionally) interesting counterpoint. And for a quick sense of the scope of fat studies, scroll down to the bottom of this rather interesting if over-the-top study of bias against the obese.

The cities of Santa Cruz, Calif., San Francisco and Washington and the state of Michigan have laws on the books prohibiting bias against fat people. Will transfats-banning Mayor Bloomberg weigh in (pun absolutely and without apology intended) on the other side?

What's more seriously noteworthy here is the conflict between the mayor's push to ban transfats and his push to require restaurants to post detailed information about fat content. While the former assumes that people are unable to make informed nutritional decisions (and, implicitly, that the city as a whole pays a hidden subsidy to support the health needs of the new phenomena of the obese poor), the latter assumes that if restaurants are required to provide this information, people will use it to make healthier choices.

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum makes an interesting and even subtle libertarian case against government intervention into Americans' weight.

The slogan "U.S. Out of My Belly!" brings to mind this classic point-counterpoint from America's finest news source, which in turn recalls this fine essay from Sadie Stein on the little discussed relation between transfats and the threat of foreign espionage.