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To the Editor:

Re “Bloomberg Says He Now Regrets ‘Stop and Frisk’” (front page, Nov. 18):

Understandable as a political strategy, but not credible as a heartfelt apology.

It’s too late and too facile, especially coming at a time when it serves Michael R. Bloomberg’s electoral interests. Especially when he defended the tactic for years in the face of undeniable evidence that it was racist and illegal. He even said, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”

As other New York City mayors have done, Mr. Bloomberg is paying the price for not restraining the Police Department’s worst practices.

Robert Gangi
New York
The writer is director of the Police Reform Organizing Project.

To the Editor:

Even if Michael R. Bloomberg’s apology is genuine and most sincere, it would have been much more credible if he had offered it to a carefully selected group of black and Latino victims of his stop-and-frisk policy instead of to a gathering at the Christian Cultural Center, a black megachurch, in Brooklyn.

His response is difficult to accept, even for African-Americans like me who would like to believe him. It suggests an apparent insensitivity to how stop-and-frisk was reminiscent of the South African passbook laws during apartheid. Under those laws, it was compulsory for all black people over 16 to carry a passbook when in a white neighborhood.

Let’s hope that Mr. Bloomberg recognizes that his apology is only a first baby step in accounting for his stop-and-frisk policy.

David L. Evans
Cambridge, Mass.

Let’s Re-examine the Science of Dietary Fats

To the Editor:

“Why Diets Are Such a Mystery,” by David S. Ludwig and Steven B. Heymsfield (Op-Ed, Nov. 14), rightly highlights the lack of funding for diet trials and notes that a dearth of such data may inhibit work by the expert committee currently reviewing the science for the next Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

In fact, many large, government-funded trials have been conducted but ignored, by all successive expert committees, since the guidelines’ launch in 1980.

Most critically, no committee has ever directly reviewed the trials on saturated fats, on more than 25,000 trial participants in experiments lasting up to 12 years. These experiments conclusively demonstrated that when people replaced saturated fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils (swapping butter for margarine, for instance), there was no reduction in cardiovascular or total mortality.

These major trials, which are the most rigorous evidence available on these fats, have been analyzed in 17 different reviews, concluding over all that there is little to no support for the government’s continued caps on saturated fats.

Thus, while we wait for new funds for new diet trials, let’s use the data we do have to provide science-based advice to the public.

Nina Teicholz
New York
The writer is executive director of the Nutrition Coalition, a nonprofit, and the author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.”

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