Christopher Flavelle writes: "Regardless, it's a strange moment in the history of American municipal government: Banning the sale of most handguns—which undeniably kill thousands of people a year—is prohibited, but it's OK to tell McDonald's how to run its business, based on a plausible but scarcely proven theory of human behavior."

Yeah, the many ironies of America often strikes me as rather absurd, too. For instance, what about road-rage? It probably kills many people or maims them for life. America loves cars and loves to speed! People who might watch their diets, might not watch their tempers too well. But, at least they will all make thin corpses.

Eating really can't be compared to smoking. The reason smoking is so frowned upon, these days, as compared to say, the 60's (the movie "Down With Love" has some hilarious smoking scenes in it to this effect) is due to the growing awareness of how bad second-hand smoke is for everyone. Plus, people still Do smoke.

I don't think the cigarette warning labels did or do much good. Does it stop kids from taking up the habit? I see lots of budding smokers walking around, apparently completely unconcerned about those labels.

As for calories - why are calories so vital to know? Lots of fresh, good food are high in calories; lots of processed diet food have comparatively few calories.

If these calorie labels are just going to encourage white women to eat more diet junk, as opposed to fast food junk, is this really much of a victory?

Also, just because a person has a fast food meal sometimes does not mean they dine out on the stuff constantly, a la Morgan Spurlock's foolish and deliberately extreme challenge to himself to eat Only a McDonald's for a month.

Wow, wasn't That a real eye-opener; eating Only at McD's for a month can make a person ill, especially if he goes for the Big Macs consistently over the salads.

If we wish to curb obesity rates, is this labeling the way to do it? People love fast food because it's tasty, cheap and easily available. Poor people, who have higher rates of obesity, overall, are probably even more influenced by the cheapness, tastiness and ubiquity of fast food. I doubt those calorie count labels will do much for them.

But, yeah, let's let guns be protected like newborn babies, in this land of violence, while we label the muffins and hamburgers and hope that guilt and big numbers will shock people into chosing a salad over a shake.

This all comes down to a "bottom line." That being, I will use my money as I wish. If I want to drive an SUV and pay huge sums of money to keep it running, then who's responsible for my choice? ME ALONE! If I want to live off a McDonald's diet, and pay money for the food, then I ALONE am responsible. Governments who get involved in the lives of citizens on this level are wasting their time and our money.

Who said anything about SUVs (annoying and dangerous as they are)? Not me. Have fun in your gas guzzler, but don't think you're entitled to rule the road with aggressive driving because you have a big...um...SUV.

To play devil's advocate:

You alone might be responsible for your choice to drive an SUV or to live on McDonald's but that doesn't mean it has not consequences for the rest of the population. It could be argued that prevelance of gas-guzzling vehicles drives up demand for gas, which drives up the price, which means that your choice has affected the life of the Prius driver at the pump next to you. I has been argued elsewhere on this board that unhealthy lifestyle choices made by some drive up the cost of health care for all. Look at Amy Winehouse, how many British tax dollars do you think are being spent thanks to her lifestyle choices? To be fair, she's probably paid out plenty of taxes, but still. The flaw in the argument that something is your own choice because it doesn't affect anyone else is that the assumption of it not affecting anyone else is usually at least a little bit false. Again, devil's advocate, because I'm not quite sure where I stand on this, but while it's not fair for the government to come in and start making all our choices for us, is it really fair for the government to stand by let one person's choices harm everyone else? Where's the line?

To play devil's advocate to your devil's advocate:

Of course, sometimes these are not choices that people make. SUVs get consistently vilified, but really, many of them aren't as inefficient as you might think. Certainly the tank-like SUVs are terrible on gas, but many of the smaller SUVs are indistinguishable on gas mileage from your average "family sedan" or minivan. As a comparison, the Ford Escape gets 22 city/28 highway, which isn't much worse than the Accord's 22/31. If you have kids to carry around (playing devil's advocate here -- you don't need a car that seats seven if you have a family of four!), having an SUV may just be more practical. And a lot of the price of gas has to do with the fact that people drive a lot, because mass transit in many parts of the U.S. is underdeveloped, inefficient, unreliable, or nonexistent, and many people have long commutes due to poor urban planning that's turned traffic in many cities into a hellish nightmare.

Likewise with fast food. You get an hour break for lunch. Maybe you can't bring a lunch from home, because your commute is so long that you barely have time to get in the shower before you leave for work. An hour probably isn't long enough to eat at a sitdown restaurant (where, by the way, the food is often not that healthy, either), or maybe it's too expensive. Oh, but you can eat McDonald's in less than an hour, and it's not that expensive. So it's unhealthy -- eating unhealthy is better than not eating at all.

Don't assume that all of these things are choices.

Touche!

I appreciate that vehicle choice is not always as much of a choice as it would seem to be. Same with food. I was responding more to the attitude (not necessarily here, but it exists, trust me) that those choices people make which really are choices (say, smoking) are, in fact, their own choices and no one else's to make because they only affect the one making the choice. I think that more than we realize, many of our choices do affect others. Again, take smoking. If I choose to smoke (and I don't anymore, cause it's too bloody expensive. See, that choice wasn't even made based on other people!) in a restaurant my choice is not only affecting me, it's affecting everyone else in the restaurant. This doesn't mean that I advocate smoking bans (I don't), just that it's up to me to acknowledge that my choice is affecting other people. So my point was that people shouldn't go around pretending that they live in a bubble and that they should just do whatever silly thing occurs to them, because other people are frequently affected. Way philosophical.

And you're not lying about poor urban planning and traffic. I have an eighty-stupid-mile round trip commute to work, and as soon as someone closer to where I live makes the choice to hire me I'll be able to get rid of it.

If I breathe in second-hand smoke, that certainly affects my health negatively. But people who eat fast food do not harm my health.

^Which is why they aren't banning the sale and consumption of fast food.