Washington – Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade. Now, the Food and Drug Administration is finishing the job.
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The FDA planned to announce Thursday it will require the food industry to gradually phase out all trans fats, saying they are a threat to people’s health. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the move could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths each year.
Hamburg said that while the amount of trans fats in the country’s diet has declined dramatically in the last decade, they “remain an area of significant public health concern.” The trans fats have long been criticized by nutritionists, and New York and other local governments have banned them.
The agency isn’t yet setting a timeline for the phase-out, but it will collect comments for two months before officials determine how long it will take. Different foods may have different timelines, depending how easy it is to find a substitute.
“We want to do it in a way that doesn’t unduly disrupt markets,” says Michael Taylor, FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods. Still, he says, the food “industry has demonstrated that it is by and large feasible to do.”
To phase them out, the FDA said it had made a preliminary determination that trans fats no longer fall in the agency’s “generally recognized as safe” category, which is reserved for thousands of additives that manufacturers can add to foods without FDA review. Once trans fats are off the list, anyone who wants to use them would have to petition the agency for a regulation allowing it, and that would be unlikely to be approved.
Trans fats are widely considered the worst kind for your heart, even worse than saturated fats, which can also contribute to heart disease. Trans fats are used both in processed food and in restaurants, often to improve the texture, shelf life or flavor of foods. They are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil to make it more solid, which is why they are often called partially hydrogenated oils.
Scientists say there are no health benefits to trans fats and say they can raise levels of so-called “bad” cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.
Many companies have already phased out trans fats, prompted by new nutrition labels introduced by FDA in 2006 that list trans fats and an by an increasing number of local laws that have banned them.
Though they have been removed from many items, the fats are still found in processed foods, including in some microwave popcorns and frozen pizzas, refrigerated doughs, cookies and ready-to-use frostings. They are also sometimes used by restaurants that use the fats for frying. Many larger chains have phased them out, but smaller restaurants may still get food containing trans fats from suppliers.
As a result of the local and federal efforts, consumers have slowly eaten fewer of the fats. According to the FDA, trans fat intake among American consumers declined from 4.6 grams per day in 2003 to around one gram per day in 2012.
FDA officials say they have been working on trans fat issues for around 15 years — the first goal was to label them — and have been collecting data to justify a possible phase-out since just after President Barack Obama came into office in 2009.
The advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest first petitioned FDA to ban trans fats nine years ago. The group’s director, Michael Jacobson, says the move is “one of the most important lifesaving actions the FDA could take.”
He says the agency should try to move quickly as it determines a timeline.
“Six months or a year should be more than enough time, especially considering that companies have had a decade to figure out what to do,” Jacobson said.
Just wait….the M’BP crowd will immediately scream gevalt and argue this is part of an Obama conspiracy (with Bloomber pulling the strings behind the scenes) to eliminate chulent, gribbens, kugel and other fatty foods from the heimeshe diet, leading to starvation in the Chareidi communities.
Can we talk seriously for a second? When you allow the government to get in control of your healthcare, which should be YOUR personal decision and no one elses, you are allowing the government to get involved in everything else in your life, all based on their claim that it is healthy according to their standards, which as we see they just make up. There really is not that much evidence that their claim is true. So if that’s the case why make companies spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in making formula changes, label changes etc. There’s no reason for this whatsoever other than a bunch of nanny statist feel good socialists had nothing better to do with their lousy pitiful lives.
So what will the doctor’s and hospitals industry do for profit ?
I had a nice conversation with the QA director of one of a MAJOR bakery. He told me and I know its true just for my time in the plant that when you take a recipe, for example cake, and you want tomommye it sugar free so you remove the sugar, there’s always a trade off, there’s always another ingredient that goes in that made not be as “beneficial ” as people think. He showed me that just because something is reduced fat, doesn’t really make it any better than the real stuff. There’s always a trade off. So these nanny state do gooders socialists want to control what you eat with really no great evidence on their side. The companies will cooperate because the government is twisting their arms but at the same time there’s no guarantee that the product is going to be any better. There will be a change in taste and maybe they’ll add more sugar or maybe the legal but more so thin but there is a way in the food industry that this gets evened out.
I should also point out that in the long run, the one that really gets hurt by all this, is the consumer because we are the ones that have to pay higher prices for no reason whatsoever. Thank you mommy government.
I can just see it now – the Great Margarine Raids. Why should the government decide what citizens eat?
Big brother always knows what is best for you…
Instead of banning something, allow the companies themselves to promote how “heart healthy” they are. It was a great ad campaign for Cheerios and it worked!
Why should the government ban something- in moderation it won’t hurt anyone. Only when consumed in excess is it a problem. But then again, too much water has been found to be a cause of death as well!!
It is about time!
This ingredient is literally a poison. Not only does it lower your good cholesterol, it also raises your bad cholesterol, so it is a double whammy.
Many manufacturers have already reduced or eliminated these partially hydrogenated oils from their foods. Sadly, the jewish brands, like reismans cookies, are still loaded with trans-fats. I hope they come to their senses soon and do the responsible thing.
Here’s the awful numbers game: The nutrition labels list trans-fat by grams, and the companies can round to the nearest gram, and they are allowed a margin-of-error of 20%. So, if there are 600 milligrams of trans-fat, it can be called 500 milligrams, and be rounded down to zero grams.
Compare that to sodium, which seems to be less harmful, and needs to be labeled in milligrams, that is, it needs to be calculated and reported 1000 times more precisely than what companies are getting away with for trans-fat
Why should the government allow something that they know is unhealthy? We would not be happy if companies put arsenic in our food or bugs!
Don’t you think health comes before taste?
Really, it’s even worse, because companies can also claim unrealistically small portion sizes in order to bring the reported value rounded down to 0 grams.
So no more margarine or shortening.
What is the kosher consumer going to do?