In an opinion piece in today’s Daily Caller, I explain how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s food police have developed a strong foothold in Washington, DC, in an effort to use the government to change how you eat.

If you liked Mayor Bloomberg’s approach to controlling how New Yorkers eat, you are going to love what federal nutrition nannies are planning for the entire U.S. population.

The top brass of Bloomberg’s food police, now top Obama administration health officials, are preparing dietary guidelines for the entire country. Despite the name, the guidelines are more than just suggestions on what to eat. A range of federal programs, from SNAP to military food allowances, are pegged to model diets based on the“guidelines.”

Yet minutes from the closed-door meetings of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee reads like a wish-list for food police and environmental activists.

The architect of many of New York City’s nanny-state polices, Dr. Sonia Angell, now runs the Noncommunicable Disease Unit for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC is headed up by Bloomberg’s former health department chief, Dr. Thomas Frieden.

In invited testimony to the Dietary Advisory Guidelines Committee in March, Dr. Angell boasted about her work in New York City and how it should be a model for not only new guidelines, but new bans.

Angell’s case in point: the City’s artificial trans-fats ban in restaurants. She used the evolution of the policy to elucidate her thinking about educational campaigns recommending voluntary dietary changes (bad), versus government enforced bans on ingredients (good).

Dr. Angell explained that the City’s 2005-2006 “market-based voluntary strategy” encouraging the reduction of trans-fats in restaurants was entirely ineffective, so City officials believed “we had, if not an ethical responsibility, certainly a public health responsibility to take action.”

She touted the benefits of bans, which change “the entire food supply to a default that is a healthier default. It isn’t about individual decision-making anymore, that’s taken out of it.”

Please see the full piece here.