What do you know about industrially produced trans fatty acids? Unless you’re actually a nutritionist or doctor, the answer is most likely: nothing at all. And why should you? A survey from a few years ago found that of the sample surveyed, 15 percent thought trans fats were good for their love lives.
Trans fats are a closely guarded secret. The food production and catering industries want to keep it that way. A handful of outlets have voluntarily begun to reduce their use under pressure from consumers, but there is no law against them.
Trans fats are a deadly side effect of boiling vegetable oil. Why boil vegetable oil? All of that goes back to a pharmacist named Wilhelm Norman in 1903. Mr. Norman was trying to find a way to make a substitute for tallow, which was very expensive at the time. Mr. Norman discovered that if he boiled cottonseed oil at 260 degrees Celsius in the presence of a catalyst like nickel, when it cooled it hardened. He had produced cheap candle wax by ‘hydrogenation of vegetable oil’. The thick grayish-white slabs produced were large candles, but Mr. Norman did not anticipate humans eating them.
The food giant, Procter & Gamble, saw the potential and bought the patent from Mr. Norman. Soon they were producing Crisco in America, a hard vegetable shortening that was excellent for baking and had a long shelf life. Along came a whole series of Crisco cookbooks for Japanese, Jewish, or Filipino homes. Titles included: A cooking course in 13 chapters; 24 cakes that men like; and Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Homemaker. The fact that Crisco was animal fat free made it ideal for vegetarian, kosher and halal households.
But there was a problem: This industrial processing of vegetable oil into hydrogenated shortening (HVO or PHVO) turned out to be killing people. It wasn’t really until a large clinical trial, The Nurses’ Health Study, which ran for about 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s, that the damage really came to light.
By carefully detailing what type of fat was consumed, the researchers identified this hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil as the queen of fast food fats that was more lethal than saturated fats. In fact, they found that you’d need to increase your saturated fat intake by about 900 percent to get the same impact you’d get from the same amount of trans fat. Just small amounts of trans fat, say two grams a day, increase the risk of heart disease by 23 percent.
There is no use looking for cartons of trans fats to avoid at the grocery store. Hydrogenated is what you need to find, anything, but that will be in the ingredients panel, quite possibly in such a small text size that unless you’ve brought your magnifying glass, you’ll be in trouble. On top of that, because in-store bakery food doesn’t need to declare its ingredients, you may still be innocently buying dangerous commercially baked goods.
So surely the European Food Standards Agency would ban it out of hand? No. It was too useful in the restaurant industry. It gives a great ‘mouthfeel’, the kind of thing you get with a good moist gooey donut or Danish pastry. It also lengthens the shelf life. A man who lobbies against trans fats in the United States appears on television with a cupcake made more than 20 years ago. He still looks perfect and has retained the smooth elasticity associated with such sweets.
Like many of the dangerous substances we consume, trans fats show up in everything from bouillon cubes to candy, from children’s cereal to vitamin tablets, Danish pastries to doughnuts, fried restaurant foods, lunch snacks like rolls of sausage and other takeaway products everywhere. They were in many of the Easter eggs we stuffed ourselves with a few weeks ago, like the ones on Quality Street, and are even in some of the so-called ‘energy’ or ‘health’ bars on supermarket shelves.
It’s ironic that so many Danish pastries contain trans fats because Denmark was the first country to ban them in 2000. Nowhere can hydrogenated vegetable oil be used and that includes the catering and restaurant industries as well as food producers. On April 1 this year, Switzerland followed Denmark and introduced similar legislation. Here in the UK and in most of the rest of Europe, we continue to push our way through mountains of dangerous products.
When I started writing Trans Fat: The Time Bomb in Your Food (Souvenir Press £8.99), it was this hoax that really bothered me. How dare the Food Standards Agency, our elected politicians, consumer outlets, and the restaurant and catering industries not tell us we’re eating candle wax?
They all knew full well 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 fat from their ‘own brand’ ranges within a year. Some made it. Others don’t. There is nothing the law can do because this was a voluntary agreement. Also, how much of what you buy in the supermarket is ‘own brand’ product? If you shop at Sainsbury’s or Tesco then it’s probably no more than 10 per cent.
Professor Steen Stender is the cardiologist in Denmark who became the 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 drop by 20 per cent. What more proof does the EU need before it dispenses with ineffective food labeling ideas?” and voluntary codes and introduce a level playing field for the food industry across the EU where no trans fat is used anywhere?”
