From the NY Post:While Mayor Bloomberg was banning trans fats and requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts, his Health Department was dishing out free coupons to McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, The Post has learned.
Since 1993, eight years before Bloomberg took office, the agency has been giving out $5 vouchers to the fast-food joints, along with round-trip MetroCards and coupons to variety stores, to encourage tuberculosis patients to return to clinics around the city for six-month treatment programs.
The agency says TB cases in the city have dropped 75 percent since patients started receiving the freebies, but a former department employee who managed TB control when the incentives began trashed the program.
"It's a big hypocrisy when they've been campaigning against people eating that stuff," the ex-employee said.
"The hypocrisy is that the city launches a campaign, as you well know, of making restaurants list calories and all that, while at the same time they themselves are proliferating free McDonald's incentive cards."
The ex-employee said he railed against it at the time because he felt "ridiculous being part of an operation handing out high-calorie gifts when my own bosses were campaigning against it."
5 comments:
They are using McDonald's coupons for attendance incentives in my school. Disgusting!
The DOH banned trans fats and required chain restaurants to post calorie counts, they never said not to eat at McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. So there's no hypocrisy.
Actually, their war on salt kind of looks hypocritical when they're handing out coupons for some of the saltiest foods available.
They also started a war on obesity, and McD's and others sell giant sodas.
I doubt fattening foods are a major concern when treating people suffering from a wasting disease.
If the population includes junkies and sick people who don't eat at all the extra calories could be all to the good.
Sometimes weight loss is a fetish. I've heard of doctors counseling cancer patients against eating highly saturated fats even as the patient became a skeleton in front of them.
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