You gotta love the government’s strategy to help us “eat healthy.”

City after city in the U.S. has banned trans fats like they’re trying to protect us. Of course, they neglect to tell us that trans fats are being replaced mostly by a type of fat that could be even worse.

But I’ve already blogged about that in Ban Trans Fats, Increase Diabetes?

Clogging your arteries is so yesterday.

No, today I’d like to talk about the dunderheads who decided it was healthy to put arsenic in our food.

Anyone who reads my blog probably knows I don’t believe in going to extremes to lose weight or eat healthy. I don’t cut the fat off pork chops or the skin off chicken.

Life’s too short.

If they keep putting arsenic in our food, it may get even shorter.

You’re safe if you live in the European Union. They don’t allow this foolish practice.

But here in the U.S., chicken producers use over 2 million pounds a year of roxarsone — an FDA-approved feed additive made from arsenic — to fight parasites, improve meat color, and produce bigger-breasted birds.

To me, common sense suggests that if you feed a potential POISON to chickens, there will be some negative health consequences down the road.

But why bother with common sense when we can spend millions of dollars studying the obvious: should we feed a potential poison to the chickens we eat?

About 95% of the arsenic passes through the birds. It can end up as fertilizer and possibly contaminate drinking water.

The rest of the arsenic settles into the chickens, including their meat.

The FDA believes the level of arsenic in the birds is safe. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture only tests chicken livers. They don’t test for arsenic in breast and thigh meat, which is what most of us eat.

They also don’t address the issue of cumulative human exposure. Chronic arsenic exposure may cause cancer, heart disease, and brain damage.

Tyson Foods and a few other chicken producers have stopped using arsenic in their feed. But most chickens in the U.S. still eat arsenic.

Yes, it’s nice to know the government is watching out for our health. We can chow down on arsenic in our chickens and mercury in our fish.

But hey, at least we’re protected from trans fats.