Trans fats: A nanny-state ban?

Amen is all I can say - get the man-made chemicals out of our food. Yes, I like all this stuff, too... but how idiotic to exchange bad health and chronic disease for convenience.

I just had a discussion with a major university employeed clinical dietitian and she conceded that not enough research has been done on all fats, as I was arguing that I am going to continue to use saturated fats and not use oils such as canola oil... (And olive oil only in cold applications, like salad dressing.) I don't know, given my huge sample of just me and my husband and both of our lipid panels are at a really good level, I am going to continue with the advice from Marks Daily Apple.

I guess I don't have a hugely strong opinion on the subject of the nanny-state... I mean, I think it's a good thing to get these chemicals out of our food... I liked the idea of banning the size of sodas in NYC, too. I mean, these chemicals are just bad, but too easy to become addicted to them. I understand the companies are huge companies and lots of people work for them, but let's get back to actual food.

I took this article from the Week Magazine, the July 3rd print edition.

Doughnuts. Cake frosting. Microwave popcorn. Besides “being delicious,” these foods have one thing in common, said Lexi Pandell in Wired​.com: They generally contain trans fats, an artificial ingredient used for extending shelf life and improving flavor and texture. But not for much longer. The Food and Drug Administration last week implemented a near-zero-tolerance ban on partially hydrogenated oils, the main source of trans fats, giving food companies three years to remove the ingredient from their products. Trans fats were long considered a healthy alternative to lard, but recent studies have linked them to serious health problems like obesity, memory loss, and heart disease. This may be the “most important change in our food supply” in decades, said Roberto Ferdman in WashingtonPost.com. While the FDA has banned numerous ingredients over the years, including artificial sweeteners such as cyclamate, none has been “so clearly linked to tens of thousands of deaths like trans fat.”

But most Americans already know this stuff is bad for them, said USA Today in an editorial. Trans-fat consumption has dropped by about 80 percent since 2003, when the FDA required manufacturers to list trans-fat content on food labels. Worried that “the truth would hurt sales,” big firms simply removed the ingredient from their products. Washington should have stuck with that successful “give-them-the-facts strategy rather than a nanny-state approach sure to produce a backlash.” If the FDA’s goal is to prevent cardiovascular disease, why stop with trans fat? asked David Harsanyi in TheFederalist.com. What about high-fructose corn syrup, a major contributor to obesity? Or cigarettes, which kill 443,000 every year? The FDA’s ban will have only a negligible effect on public health, but it will “create precedents that allow further intrusions into how and what we eat.”

If anything, the “trans fat saga shows how hard it is to get nutritional science right,” said Sarah Kaplan in WashingtonPost.com. Until relatively recently, experts called trans fats “a great boon to Americans’ arteries” and warned us to avoid the kinds of saturated fats found in butter, eggs, and meat. Now that advice has been reversed. But we can’t be too hard on researchers, because determining exactly what’s healthy is an inexact science. Some nutrients work only in conjunction with others; all chemicals affect different bodies in different ways. “It’s a difficult recipe to get right.”