Trans fats: Still a threat to heart health, despite FDA ‘eviction notice’
Fred Kummerow is a scientist on a mission. And media outlets everywhere have been running with the same story.
Mission accomplished.
The University of Illinois professor, who turned 100 last fall, has been locked in a heroic six-decade battle with the FDA over deadly trans fats. A battle that many declared over last week when the agency finally ordered trans fats removed from processed foods.
But there are some big problems ahead for those who don’t want their arteries clogged any longer by this unnecessary and dangerous food additive.
Major food companies have wrangled three more years to keep packing trans fats into our food. And a lobbying group looks like it’s on the prowl for loophole that could keep Americans eating this poison for generations to come.
But you don’t need to tell that to researchers like Professor Kummerow. It was 58 years ago when he first looked at the arteries of people who had died of heart disease and found they were jam-packed with trans fats, an artificial fat that was becoming widely used.
And when Kummerow fed rats a diet heavy on artificial trans fats, he noticed that their arteries began to harden.
Kummerow discovered one of the greatest preventable causes of heart disease in America — and he spent decades sounding the alarm. He published research, gave talks around the world, and even sued the FDA in 2013, claiming the additive had “contributed to a national epidemic of coronary heart disease.”
So when the FDA announced last week that trans fats would be removed from food, you can forgive Kummerow for celebrating a little.
“Science won out,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s very important that we don’t have this in our diet.”
But the battle isn’t over — and in some ways, it may be just beginning.
Because Big Food is proving it isn’t going away without a fight. Lost in the FDA announcement — and much of the reporting on it — was that the major food companies have wrangled three more years to remove trans fats from foods. That’s three years to lobby and lean on the FDA to soften, or even scrap, the ban.
If you’re wondering why food manufacturers can’t simply ditch this killer additive, just think of the two things that are most important to industry: money and money. Trans fats like partially hydrogenated oil are far cheaper than using a natural fat in a product and they make foods last practically forever.
Even the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a major industry lobbying group, doesn’t seem to be losing any sleep over the FDA’s directive to remove trans fats from food. In a recent letter to members, a senior GMA executive wrote that “It’s a mistake to say that FDA has banned trans fats… It’s not a ban.”
And the GMA added that food companies can submit a petition to the FDA asking for special permission to use trans fats in food — and that the agency “encouraged the industry to do just that.” There’s even a trans-fats loophole enacted by the FDA that says amounts of up to 0.5 grams per serving can be labeled “0 trans fat.”
The only way to reliably get trans fats out of our diets is to do it ourselves — and to do that, you need to go right to the ingredients list on everything you buy. If you see any mention of partially hydrogenated oil of any kind, you know that product contains trans fats and should go right back where you found it.
And it looks like Professor Kummerow is living proof that you can get to be 100 on a diet free from trans fats. He even recalled to a reporter how someone came to his 100th birthday party with a store-bought cake containing partially hydrogenated oil.
One that got tossed in the trash, uneaten.
That’s something we all should be doing with any foods we find in our kitchen that contain any amount, no matter how small, of this killer additive.
Sources:
“The 100-year-old scientist who pushed the FDA to ban artificial trans fat” Brady Dennis, June 16, 2015, The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com
