The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday proposed measures that would all but eliminate artificial trans fats, the artery clogging substance that is a major contributor to heart disease in the United States, from the food supply.

 

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Under the proposal, which is open for public comment for 60 days, the agency would declare that partially hydrogenated oils, the source of trans fats, were no longer “generally recognized as safe,” a legal category that permits the use of salt and caffeine, for example.

That means companies would have to prove scientifically that partially hydrogenated oils are safe to eat, a very high hurdle given that scientific literature overwhelmingly shows the contrary. The Institute of Medicine has concluded that there is no safe level for consumption of artificial trans fats.

“That will make it a challenge, to be honest,” said Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the F.D.A.

Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the agency’s commissioner, said the rules could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year.

The move concluded three decades of battles by public health advocates against artificial trans fats, which occur when liquid oil is treated with hydrogen gas and made solid. The long-lasting fats became popular in frying and baking and in household items like margarine, and were cheaper than animal fat, like butter.

But over the years, scientific evidence has shown they are worse than any other fat for health because they raise the levels of so-called bad cholesterol and can lower the levels of good cholesterol. In 2006, an F.D.A. rule went into effect requiring that artificial trans fats be listed on food labels, a shift that prompted many large producers to eliminate them. A year earlier, New York City told restaurants to stop using artificial trans fats in cooking. Many major chains like McDonalds, found substitutes, and eliminated trans fats.

Those actions led to major advances in public health: Trans fat intake declined among Americans to about one gram a day in 2012, down from 4.6 grams in 2006. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that blood levels of trans fatty acids among white adults in the United States declined by 58 percent from 2000 to 2009.

But the fats were not banned, and still lurk in many popular processed foods, such as microwave popcorn, certain desserts, frozen pizzas, margarines and coffee creamers.

“The artery is still half clogged,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the disease centers. “This is about preventing people from being exposed to a harmful chemical that most of the time they didn’t even know was there.”

He noted that artificial trans fats are required to be on the label only if there is more than half a gram per serving, a trace amount that can add up fast and lead to increased risk of heart attack. Even as little as two or three grams of trans fat a day can increase the health risk, scientists say.

“It’s quite important,” said Dr. Frieden, who led the charge against the fats in New York when he was health commissioner there. “It’s going to save a huge amount in health care costs and will mean fewer heart attacks.”

Some trans fats occur naturally. The F.D.A. proposal only applies to those that are added to foods.

Public health advocates applauded the measure.

“Most of it is gone, but what remains is still a serious problem,” said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which petitioned the F.D.A. to require artificial trans fats to be listed on nutrition labels as early as 1994.

“I suspect there are thousands of smaller restaurants that continue to use it out of ignorance,” he said, adding that they ask: “'Trans what?’ They just use whatever the supplier sends.”

But public awareness can be powerful. This summer Mr. Jacobson’s nonprofit group drew attention to the fact that the so-called Big Catch fried fish meal at Long John Silvers, which comes with fried hush puppies and fried potatoes, contained 33 grams of trans fat. The restaurant chain has since promised to eliminate trans fats by the end of the year.

Resent from the past : About the blessed country Denmark

 

What may  Denmark and Yitro have in common?

Well quite a couple of years ago I wrote the Danish Embassy [ this is not my daily “work”.....] to transfer my blessings-as a doctor from Jerusalem-to tell them how impressed I was with their decision to ban nearly all transfatty acids from their products, as the first country in the world.

I wrote them why I thought they may have been the first to take this decision[see below], not only by their "logic medical reasoning",but by being blessed.

A bit of background which you probably all know by now:

For at least some 40 years it is known how damaging artificial fats/oils can be.

When I came to Israel I soon came to know the book of the American Psychiatrist Rudolph Ballentine [Diet and Nutrition] which  tremendously influenced me in all fields of medicine and since a 33 years or so I have been advising patients what fats or oils to use [all in the merit of Dr Ballentine]

I could hardly believe that all this was published  scientifically and known and that virtually nobody paid any attention to all this knowledge.

Some where in 2000 Denmark started banning these damaging fats/oils.

I wondered how it came that Denmark was the only country in the world which started implementing the consequences of a since long known fact.   Every country could have known!

This implementation would mean without the slightest doubt that from old to young,  disease and mortality would  go down.[see later on]

Could anybody think about a bigger blessing??

Give every citizen an extra  a million and car accidents and disease may increase , but general health not.

This blessing [like all blessings of course] must  have been in this case a special  Heavenly One.[to bless a whole population with an instant increase in all areas of health]

Then I had an idea [ and this of course is just my  idea and anybody is allowed to put it aside [but I would think about it at least......]

First this remark : One is not allowed to judge why disasters happens to countries or to individuals.

But it seems to me [and I asked advise about this ] that if specially good things are happening to a group/country we are allowed to think why these happened and may be even spread our thoughts.

Denmark may have been repaid “Good for Good”  [Mida ke-neged Mida ]by the Allmighty and “Good for Good” should be recognizable [meaning what one gets back should be clearly connected with one’s deeds or -spare us- the opposite]

DENMARK SAVED -more then any other country- the Jews in the second world-war..................and now G-d gave their Government the insight to change a law, to save their own population : LIFE FOR LIFE.

I could not but write to the Danish embassy about this [I never got an answer and did not expect this either] 

And now the connection between Denmark and Yitro?

Denmark saw [with the help of G-d ] all that was examined and took the consequences and came.......to change things, just as Yitro came after he heard all that G-d had done for Israel [and did no stay in this place, as an “onlooker”]

And below an article from the INTERNET ...VERY IMPRESSIVE

Professor Steen Stender is the cardiologist inDenmark who became the driving force behind the decision to ban trans fats there. He says: "Between the introduction of the ban in 2000 and 2005, we saw heart disease rates in this country decline by 20 per cent. What more proof does the EU need before it dispenses with ineffective food labelling ideas and voluntary codes and introduces a level playing field for the food industry throughout the EU where no trans fats are used anywhere?"

The truth about trans fat

A clinical trial in the 1970s showed just how harmful trans fats are - so why can they still be found in most baked foods in our supermarkets?

Maggie Stanfield

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What do you know about industrially produced trans fatty acids? Unless you are actually a nutritionist or a doctor, the answer is most likely to be: nothing at all. And why should you? One survey a few years ago found that of the sample asked, 15 per cent thought trans fats were good for your love life.

Trans fats are a lethal side effect of boiling vegetable oil. Why boil vegetable oil? That all goes back to a pharmacist called Wilhelm Norman in 1903. Mr Norman was trying to find a way of making a substitute for tallow, which was very expensive at the time. Mr Norman discovered that if he boiled cotton seed oil up to 260 degrees Centigrade in the presence of a catalyst such as nickel, that when it cooled, it went hard. He had produced cheap candle wax by “hydrogenating vegetable oil”. The thick, greyish-white slabs produced were great candles but Mr Norman did not anticipate human beings eating them.

Food giant, Proctor & Gamble, saw the potential and bought the patent from Mr Norman. They were soon producing Crisco in America, a hard vegetable fat that was great for baking and had a long shelf life. Along came a whole series of Crisco cookery books for Japanese, Jewish or Philippine households. Titles included: A Cookery Course in 13 Chapters; 24 Pies Men Like; and Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife. That Crisco contained no animal fat made it ideal for vegetarian, Kosher and Halal households.

But there was a problem: this industrial processing of vegetable oil into hydrogenated fat (HVO or PHVO) turned out to be killing people. It was not really until a big clinical trial, The Nurses' Health Study, which ran for about 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s that the damage really surfaced.

By carefully detailing just what kinds of fat were being consumed, the researchers identified this hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil as the queen of fast food. It was more of a killer than saturated fats. They discovered that you would need to increase your intake of saturates by about 900 per cent to have the same harmful impact that you would have from the same amount of trans fat. Just small amounts of trans fat - say two grammes a day - increases your risk of heart disease by 23 per cent.

There is no use looking for cartons of trans fat to avoid on the supermarket shelves. What you need to look for is hydrogenated-anything on the ingredients panel, very possibly in a text so small that unless you have a magnifying glass, you will find it hard to read. Even so, you may still innocently purchase commercially baked produce containing trans fats - because the ingredients do not have to be declared on in-store bakery goods.

So surely the European Food Safety Authority would ban it immediately? Not so. It is far too useful in the catering trade. Apparently, it gives great “mouth feel” - what you get with a nice sticky doughnut or a moist Danish pastry. It lengthens shelf life too. One man lobbying against trans fats in America appears on television with a cup cake made more than 20 years ago. It still looks perfect and has retained the soft springiness associated with such confections.

Like so many of the dangerous substances we consume, trans fats appear in everything from stock cubes to sweets, children's cereals to vitamin tablets, Danish pastries to doughnuts, deep-fried foods in restaurants, lunchtime snacks like sausage rolls and other produce from takeaways. They were in lots of the Easter eggs we gorged on a few weeks ago, they are even in some of the so-called “energy” or “health” bars on the supermarket shelves.

It is ironic that so many Danish pastries contain trans fat because Denmark was the first country to ban them in 2000. Nowhere there can hydrogenated vegetable oil be used, including within the catering and restaurant industries as well as the food producers. On April 1 this year, Switzerland followed Denmark and introduced similar legislation. In the rest of Europe, we continue to gorge our way through mountains of dangerous products.

When I came to write my book on the subject, it was this deception that really annoyed me. How dare the Food Standards Agency, our elected politicians, the consumer outlets and the catering and restaurant industries not tell us that we are eating candle wax.

All of them have known full well about how trans fats are associated not only with a five-fold increase in heart disease but also with Type 2 diabetes, some cancers, infertility, inflammatory diseases, obesity and insulin resistance.

Eight of the big supermarkets said in January 2007 that they would remove all trans fats from their “own brand” ranges within the year. Some managed it. Others did not. There is nothing the law can do because this was a voluntary agreement. Besides, how much of what you buy in the supermarket is “own brand” produce? If you shop at Sainsbury or Tesco, then it is likely to be no more than 10 per cent.

Professor Steen Stender is the cardiologist inDenmark who became the driving force behind the decision to ban trans fats there. He says: "Between the introduction of the ban in 2000and 2005, we saw heart disease rates in this country decline by 20 per cent. What more proof does the EU need before it dispenses with ineffective food labelling ideas and voluntary codes and introduces a level playing field for the food industry throughout the EU where no trans fats are used anywhere?"

Maggie Stanfield is the author of Trans Fat: The Time Bomb in Your Food (Souvenir Press £8.99),