Regulation: it's what's for dinner

Oh, great. More busybodies telling people how they ought to live their lives and wanting the government to get involved with restaurant menus:

Many U.S. chain restaurants are promoting "extreme eating" with dishes that pack at least a day's worth of calories and fat, without giving customers facts about their orders, a consumer group said on Monday.

Displaying restaurant offerings including a cheese-laden chicken-and-pasta dish they dubbed "Angioplasta," officials at the Center for Science in the Public Interest said such dishes help fuel national epidemics of obesity and heart disease.

They urged local, state and national governments to make restaurants list nutritional data on their menus.

Michael Jacobson, the group's executive director, took aim at "table-service" chain restaurants like Ruby Tuesday's and Uno Chicago Grill. Such places increasingly stuff their dishes with extra unhealthy ingredients, he said.

"What we're finding is that table-service restaurants have launched into a whole new era of extreme eating," Jacobson said. "If we're going to deal with the epidemic of obesity and the tremendous prevalence of heart attacks and strokes, we're going to have to do something about restaurant foods."

Um, no "we" don't. People need to make choices about what they want to eat. If they want to eat healthy food, they can make that choice. If they want to load up on a lot of fattening crap, why, they can make that choice, too.

Oh, and I just love the example this guy showed reporters:

Jacobson showed reporters an appetizer offered by Uno Chicago Grill that he said contained 2,050 calories. It was a cross between a pizza and stuffed potato skins, with a deep-dish pizza crust crammed with mozzarella and cheddar cheese, mashed potatoes, bacon and sour cream.

Look, if you don't know that something like that isn't good for you, you're a moron. And if you eat stuff like that every day, you're probably not going to live to a ripe old age. Does that mean the government needs to step in and regulate restaurant menus? I don't think so. But these people think the government needs to step in to be our nanny because we're too stupid to make our own choices.

The sad thing is that they'll probably ultimately succeed.