Slashdot Mirror
FDA Bans Trans Fat
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has finally come to a conclusion about artificial trans fat: it must be removed from the U.S. food supply over the next three years. According to their final determination (PDF), there's no longer a scientific consensus that partially hydrogenated oils are safe to consume. Trans fat must be gone from food in the U.S. by June, 2018, unless a petitioner is granted specific approval by the FDA to continue using it. "Many baked goods such as pie crusts and biscuits as well as canned frosting still use partially hydrogenated oils because they help baked goods maintain their flakiness and frostings be spreadable. As for frying, palm oil is expected to be a go-to alternative, while modified soybean oil may catch on as well." The food industry is expected to spend $6.2 billion over the next two decades to formulate replacements, but the money saved from health benefits is expected to be more than 20 times higher.
There is no reason to want to consume trans-fat. It holds roughly the same taste and texture as saturated fats, but cannot be broken down easily by the body, remaining in the blood stream for quite a long time.
If you want healthier but less tasty and more runny fats, eat unsaturated fats (vegetable oils) - if you want less healthy but more tasty, thick fats, eat saturated fats (animal fats). If you want to try and save money by trying to morph unsaturated fats into saturated fats and wind up with something that will kill you, eat trans-fats.
It's not. it's what, 55% fructose, 45% sucrose -- whereas table sugar is a 50/50 split?
I own a chocolate company. We make high quality chocolate from cocoa beans that we import directly from the farmers. When I fly over Central and South America, I almost tear up when I see the total devastation caused by Palm Oil. From 30,000 feet, there are times that as far as you can see it is mostly palm oil plantations -- especially over the Yucatan Peninsula. The thing to keep in mind is that unlike many crops, palm oil plantations allow for very little undergrowth and general bio diversity mixed in. (Cocoa often will have other crops mixed in as well as larger "mother trees" of various species shading the cocoa. There is also typically quite a bit of wildlife living in and around the cocoa plantations.) Yes, I've walked in and around palm oil plantations. They are strangely beautiful in the same sense that the European forests with trees all in rows are beautiful. Even so, palm oil plantations wreck total devastation on the local fauna and as much as banning trans fats may help our general health, banning trans fats will certainly destroy the rain forests in and around the equatorial belt.
What about good old lard and butter? It used to work just fine on pie crusts. Lard works great for frying my egg. It conveniently comes from the bacon I'm frying up at the same time.
If the measurement threshold is large enough than it can be like those fat free butter sprays that are made from oil and water. When you can say trans fat free as long as it has less than a gram of it why bother changing it when they're mostly milligram doses anyway? Oh and from the fine article it appears the real reason is that Monsanto genetically engineered Soybeans to naturally produce trans fats. So they can use them but not have to claim them.
FDA has decided a lot of things, many of which turned out not to be true. According to the FDA, Walnuts are a drug (yes it is true).
No it's not true. The FDA forced a walnut distributor to remove some unsubstantiated health claims from the packaging of their products: http://www.fda.gov/iceci/enforcementactions/warningletters/ucm202825.htm. People making false claims about the health benefits of their products (e.g. selling grain alcohol mixed with an emetic as cure-all) was the whole reason the FDA was created.
Walnuts are not classified as a drug, but if you claim they cure cancer without a good double blind study to back you up, you will be called on your bullshit. This is a good thing and is an example of a government agency exercising it's regulatory authority within the appropriate ambit. There are plenty of other real government conspiracies both covert and flagrant to worry about without inventing more.
No, it is not true.
But once again you misstate the story.
The FDA did not declare walnuts to be a drug.
The FDA -did- send a warning letter to Diamond Foods warning them that they were overselling their product, and crossing a legal line in doing so.
The FDA warning stated Diamond Foods was effectively marketing its walnuts AS a drug due to the claims it was making in its marketing in its attempt to sell the walnuts. That is a far different thing from declaring all walnuts to be a drug. Companies frequently make claims about the benefits of their products, including food companies. But there is a limit to what is allowed, and Diamond Foods went beyond it.
Among their claims were that their walnuts could "inhibit tumor growth", "reduce incidence of breast cancer", that they could "treat major depression", and "reduce chance of stroke".
Diamond Foods was overselling their product by making several false or unsubstantiated medical claims, to the extent that they crossed into territory properly defined as "marketing a drug for medical treatment purposes".
And as a result Diamond Foods settled with the FDA and corrected its packaging and marketing.
Link to the actual warning letter: http://www.fda.gov/iceci/enfor...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Go learn. You need to know what HFCS actually is before you can have my attention while you spout off about it.
It's sugar. Specifically, it's corn molasses distilled to remove moisture volume.
No.
HFCS is corn syrup that is processed with an enzyme that converts the glucose in the corn syrup into fructose. Fructose is a naturally occurring sugar found in most fruits and vegetables. The problem with HFCS is right there in the name: HIGH FRUCTOSE corn syrup. HFCS is highly concentrated sugar, which means you are getting far more than you would with an equivalent amount of another sweetener.
What has transfat in it that you want?
First, it's important to note that foods can be sold as "trans-fat free" even if they contain 0.49 grams of trans fat per serving, because they're allowed to round off to the nearest gram. You need to check the ingredients list for the word "hydrogenated" to know for certain - if there are no hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, then it will not have any trans fat.
Just about anything that's deep fried commercially, either prepackaged or restaurants. There are exceptions, of course, but it's commonly used in commercial cooking because trans fats resist going rancid (bacteria and mold have just as much difficulty metabolizing it as your body does) - it lasts longer and is therefore cheaper.
Since trans fats are semisolid at room temperature, they are often found in vegetable-based spreadable fats. Margarine is basically pure trans fat. Shortening and frosting (spreadable fat mixed with sugar and color) are also likely to contain it, if not be entirely made from it. naturally, anything made with shortening like pastry crusts will have trans fat in it as a result.
Non-dairy creamers can contain trace amounts. Microwave popcorn is possible because the kernels are in a solid lump of trans fat that melts when heated. Milkshakes and the like can have quite a lot of it.
Any kind of commercially produced baked good - again, trans fat resists going rancid so it helps the shelf life. Cookies, cakes, crackers, etc.
So yeah, unless you're a strict vegan who only eats stuff from your own farm for "decades", you've almost certainly eaten something with added trans fats.
=Smidge=
It's not. it's what, 55% fructose, 45% sucrose -- whereas table sugar is a 50/50 split?
Where did you get the idea that you can take a food, completely ignore the body's metabolism, list its component molecules, and declare parity? It's a complete stretch, and so it's completely wrong. This is 1982-era reasoning.
The major problem is the rate-limiting factors of liver enzymes. The liver can handle a little bit of fructose at a time. If it gets overrun, it quickly manufactures triglycerides with the excess fructose, and those run right out and stick to the arterial walls (I know, triglycerides don't like to be anthropomorphized).
Sucrose metabolism is almost entirely rate-limited by the amount of available sucrase enzyme in the small intestine (the stomach acid affects 10% of the amount consumed). This provides a slow-sip of fructose to the liver, so it's much more manageable. This built-in protection is defeated by using HFCS or any unbound glucose/fructose syrup - the liver gets it nearly all at once. Keep that up and you'll be fat and get heart disease.
It's still possible to overload the liver with excess amounts of sucrose - you have more sucrase than liver enzymes, so anything more than a taste of sugar is still going to be a problem. This works out OK if you're going to be starving all winter, but in modern Western societies that starvation never happens, so the weight keeps piling on.
Even if you don't understand the biochemistry, the two basic rules still work well - don't buy stuff in the middle of the grocery store and don't eat anything your Grandmother wouldn't recognize as food from her childhood. Hrm, we might need to up that to "Great Grandmother" these days; if the ingredients label lists a chemical shitstorm straight out of Post-WWII "better living through chemistry - try the transfats!" insanity, don't eat it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)