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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.
One could argue HFCS is worse than transfat and it is used everywhere. Come on, get on a roll, FDA!
Trans fats are an unwanted biproduct of hydrogenation, and are a fat which humans do not have an enzyme to easily break down. This should directly reduce this incidence of heart disease, and is good news for everyone except cost-cutting food producers.
I doubt the Oil Partial Hydrogenators Union has the same pull on capital hill as the Corn Growers Association.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Oh well, the FDA can't do anything about the rainforests.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
go buy some. I'm sure the chinese would be happy to sell it to you.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The agricultural lobby is very powerful in the US. Very powerful indeed. They are not easily crossed.
Then you should also sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat potential illnesses caused that have direct links to the digestion of trans fats, unless you pay for it yourself.
I'm all for "it's my body" and all that, I honestly am, but not at the expense of others.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I predict that within the week there will be a website somewhere running a variation of 'Obama decrees transfats illegal' with an article claiming science proves they promote weight-loss and prevent cancer, concluding in a warning that regulation of diet is the mark of a communist takeover.
If you can find it or make it yourself, go ahead and eat it.
This just means you can't get FDA approval for a recipe if you use trans fats in it. And without FDA approval you cannot sell the resulting food in a store.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
Then you should also sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat potential illnesses caused that have direct links to the digestion of trans fats, unless you pay for it yourself.
Sure thing. I'm not entitled to that.
I'm all for "it's my body" and all that, I honestly am, but not at the expense of others.
Agreed.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
One can also argue that any kind of refined sugar is not good for you. HFCS is certainly the worst but cane/beet sugar in any form is not healthy in any way. Even the "raw" forms that are just slightly less refined than table sugar are terrible for you, especially in the quantities we consume them.
Uh, the article you linked to explains all about the ill effects of trans fats, including quotes such as "Most scientific research shows that even trace amounts can be harmful to health." Maybe you should read what you link to first next time. Also I suggest you read up on trans-fats!
It's not. it's what, 55% fructose, 45% sucrose -- whereas table sugar is a 50/50 split?
Ever notice how many reforms are actually reversals of previous reforms? Trans fats got a huge boost in the '70s and '80s because the reformers were convinced that saturated fat was very bad for you. Margarine was supposed to be more healthy than butter. So manufacturers ditched saturated fats and went for trans fats.
Similarly, now people want to ban animal testing, which established at the insistence of the reformers of a century ago. HMOs were a healthcare reform of the '70s, and are now reviled. People now complain about mandatory minimum sentencing, which was a '70s reform meant to end the problem of wildly disparate sentences.
And so the cycle goes....
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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.
Great! How about cigarettes?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Plastic bags also used to be what was going to save the environment.
So you are against:
Smoking, all forms?
Chewing Tobacco?
Excessive hours posting on Slashdot, playing video Games, etc?
Fast Food?
And and all non-prescribed drugs, including Weed?
Cars that go faster than, say, 65 mph?
Rock climbing or any other dangerous sport?
And we aren't' talking discouraging, we are talking prohibiting by force of federal law.
So you are down with all this and more because, "...but not at the expense of others.."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
by now we've all consumed enough of them to potentially suffer
Not likely. While I certainly agree that trans fats are bad, I think there are things that people consume that are much worse for them that they consume more often. Take for example refined sugars, or pure/mostly pure simple carbohydrate breakfasts (which if you eat cereal or bread of any variety for breakfast, then that describes you. That also includes any variety of bread/pasta throughout the day.) The message of avoiding (for example) eggs and bacon for breakfast in favor of cereals, waffles, or pancakes was the wrong one, which the FDA only finally realized just a few months ago.
I honestly think that is doing more harm to most people than trans fats are. Believe it or not, simple carbs raise your cholesterol and triglycerides far more than fats and dietary cholesterol, and the reason why is because your liver has to make up for the unsaturated fats that you aren't consuming, and it produces all lipids/cholesterol as a packaged deal.
I'm actually a living example of what I just described, by the way. After switching to just eggs and sausage for breakfast every single day, my cholesterol is now normal without taking any kind of statin drugs, and I used to be on a heavy dose.
Soybean Oil...well soy in general is an Allergen for a statistically significant portion of the population. NOT a good replacement. World needs to move away from modified anything. Go back to good old natural fats and Oils.
Lard folks....use Lard!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I see you still haven't bothered to learn the definition of "socialism".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
He wasn't suggesting it was safer. He was suggesting it was billed as being safer. The article supports his point, since it mentions that historically the stuff was used as a substitute for butter and lard, both because it was cheaper, and because it was a means of reducing saturated fats in our food. They specifically called out the switch from butter to margarine (which is (was?) made with trans fats) as an example of this trend to treat trans fats as being healthier than the alternatives.
I'd say he read his article just fine, since it supports what he's saying. It also supports what you're saying, which is that modern research is showing the stuff is ridiculously bad for you, despite what we were told in the past. You're both correct.
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.
This way, people have a choice.
If the tax is sufficiently high, then in practice, the people who will consume it the most will tend to be richer... and can generally more readily afford to pay for any of the extra health care they may need because of a poor diet.
As a side effect, it also offers a revenue stream.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No, I don't, actually. This is all based on advise I took from a doctor after being diagnosed with NAFLD. The simplified message they gave me was "eat less sugar." But I looked it up and found things like this:
http://www.webmd.com/heart-dis...
And this:
http://drhyman.com/blog/2014/0...
And of course, an NIH whitepaper that I can't find at the moment.
Anyways, knowing what I already knew about calories, and the fact that I was already consuming fewer calories than my basal metabolic rate, meant I had to shift my calorie consumption away from carbs and more towards protein/fat. And, it was the correct move.
So you are down with all this and more because, "...but not at the expense of others.."
I am for him not having to pay for the consequences of people who do those things, if he doesn't want to. I believe they should be allowed to do it, and agree they shouldn't get to do what they want at the expense of others.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I'm not a fan of banning them either. However, given the rate of obesity and type 2 diabetes in this country with strong evidence they are caused by our increased consumption of various kinds of sugar ("real" sugar and HFCS), I would be very much in favor of a relatively high tax on them.
The reason they're used in processed foods is because they are an effective and cheap flavor enhancer. Tax them and they become less economically viable in cheap bulk processed foods. Consumption would naturally go down as alternatives were substituted. And for the people that still consume it in quantity, the tax revenue can be funneled into taking care of the health problems caused by over consumption. Win win.
This is a bit of a silly reduction ad absurdum. The problem with trans fats is that they are cheap and satisfying, and so they wind up in lots and lots of foods people eat, to the point that it's hard to find foods of that type that don't contain them, and you really have to care to find the difference. What this typically looks like is that poor people get foods that are high in trans fats, and well-off people get foods that are not, because poor people shop at price chopper, if they are lucky enough to have one they can get to, and well-off people shop at Whole Foods. And you see this very clearly when you look at health outcomes.
So it's not analogous to tobacco smoke, where the person consuming it has a choice. It's not analogous to chewing tobacco. It is related to fast food, because that's where you find the trans fats, but this actually makes choosing fast food healthier for you.
The point is that whether we make people who make risky health choices pay more or not, this actually eliminates a totally unnecessary health risk that nobody would choose to take on if they had a choice. And that can have a really serious effect on costs down the road, so it's economically a really smart thing to be doing, since health care costs are so high right now. But since it's a choice that can't be made at the point of purchase of the health care, it has to be done some other way, and this is a good way to do it.
tax those things, like cigarettes. i would have been fine with taxing trans fats. but banning them is ok only because there are suitable replacements
the immature understanding of freedom is "i can do whatever i want, damn the consequences"
the mature understanding of freedom is "i can do whatever i want as long as i don't impinge on the freedom of others"
and if your behavior costs me with higher taxes and healthcare premiums for your care, then i have a say in you doing those things, and sending you a bill to help pay for the inevitable higher costs you are causing to me
you really can do whatever you want in life. but if what you do costs others, you are going to be sent a bill
avoiding that bill shows you to be an ignorant freeloader, not a freedom loving person
and this really has nothing to do with big bad evil authoritarian government come to destroy your freedom just for fun and laughs
it's about the natural limitations on your freedoms: the freedoms of others
absolutely. and you're not? you're ok with doing things that cost others without their consent?
that doesn't make you freedom loving. that makes you a thieving freeloader
i'm going to move in next to you and blast loud music at 3 AM. i'm going to jeopardize your life by racing by you in the highway at 95 mph. i'm going to buy a dog and keep hi unchained and let him get in your yard to crap and dig holes. you're telling me that's ok, because your immature "understanding" of freedom apparently means i can do whatever the fuck i want, who gives a fuck if my choices harm or cost others. right?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In the past few years, I don't recall coming across a single product that had any trans fat.
FDA had mandatory labeling for transfats, which contained a loophole. You could put a label stating "0g transfat" if your product contains less than 0.5g of transfat per serving. If you define your serving size as 1g than your product can be made of nearly 50% transfats. Many bakery products, particularly the ones with long shelf life do contain transfats and can be labeled as "0g transfat". That's why some manufacturers use a label "No transfats" to indicate that there are indeed no transfats in their product.
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.
There, fixed that for you... your original looked very odd to those of us old enough remember when the agricultural lobby was the farm lobby.
HFC is not sugar. It has a different chemical signature and is metabolized differently than sugar. It's actually worse than sugar.
trans fats we've known for nearly 10 years are killing us but its not enough. the industry has sat on no brainers for too long and shuffled their lobbyists to the tune of profit. Among others that could be and should be banned:
High Fructose Corn Syrup has turned us into a nation too fat for everything from coffins to military service. numerous studies concur this isnt sugar.
Palm Oil most foods with this ingredient either dont need it, or source it out of a 40 year old legacy habit from colonial dominionism of US trade. the WHO has declared it an abomination, and its destroying rainforest at an alarming rate.
Cigarettes full stop. this shouldnt even be a fucking debate.
Margerine. this is a culinary abortion with as much or more cardiovascular destructiveness as the butter it so readily supplanted in the 70s. ban this sick filth and lets work on diets that contain respectable, conservative amounts of solid fats when needed.
among other things we could cut down on are processed foods in general. its an industry that scams billions out of americans who are manipulated into willfully and ignorantly assuming boiling water and dispensing corn+soy+sodium from a cardboard box is cooking. Jamie oliver was right. Children should be taught at minimum 25 recipes they can use in life for healthy meals and the recipes should then be a required component of graduation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So I can sell you sugar laced with arsenic? I can sell you rat labeled as chicken? Get real. You're very happy with the people telling your stores what they can and cannot sell you as long as it's some perceived benefit rather than some perceived slight.
Why in the world you would consider this a limit on your personal freedom I have no idea but we all have our crosses to bear. This may be one of yours, I guess. What exactly do you have a problem with in this decision? The lack of consensus in research or some concern you have over what the replacements will be (and their impacts) or just bitching for the sake of bitching?
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Not to mention, if we're going to ban things that are bad for us, where is the ban on all tobacco and alcohol?
Then you should also sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat potential illnesses caused that have direct links to the digestion of trans fats, unless you pay for it yourself.
Well, okay. Then YOU should sign a card saying you are not entitled to medical care to treat illnesses after you live past the average life expectancy of the general population, unless you pay for it yourself.
I'm all for "it's my body" and all that, I honestly am, but not at the expense of others.
Then pay up if you live long! Seriously.
This is generally the problem with people who make these arguments. There are lots of studies that show that medical costs associated with "unhealthy behaviors" also tend to result in EARLIER DEATH. Meanwhile, there are plenty of studies that show that total medical costs increase significantly with age.
Which means that the greatest cost to society is generally due to the "healthy" people who live to 95 and have to have multiple joint replacements, break hips here and there, have chronic degenerative illnesses that might take 10 or 20 years to kill someone, have a few rounds of minor cancer treatments over the years, and require many years of round-the-clock care after their minds succumb to dementia until they finally die.
Meanwhile, that poor fat guy who ate terribly cost a hell of a lot in diabetes treatment in his 50s, but then he was nice enough to save money for society by having a heart attack and dying at age 62, right after his retirement party.
In sum, when you actually take into account the extra medical expenses caused by LIVING LONGER, it's usually enough to make "healthy" people more expensive over a lifespan compared to people with "unhealthy" behaviors. (This goes for smoking, obesity, etc.)
So, if you're talking about annual premiums for insurance, sure -- I'm with you: make people who eat trans fats pay more if it's actually going to increase short-term medical expenses.
But if you're looking at overall societal costs for people over their lives, be prepared to pony up when you end up living longer and costing more for your "healthy" lifestyle.
(P.S. I don't use trans fats and haven't really used them much ever in my cooking. I don't give a crap if they disappear from processed foods, because I generally avoid them. But this has no bearing on whether your argument is wrong.)
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.
Ayn Rand herself spent her final years on government assistance, taking Medicare and Social Security.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I think it's hilarious when people with slightly different opinions compared to the vast spectrum of positions available argue that the other's position is so incredibly different from their own. None of us want to live in Somalia or in North Korea, where the state effectively doesn't exist or where the state maintains absolute control. We all want the state to do things as an organization, and the very slight differences between what we all want are so small that getting this butt-hurt about them is just stupid.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
I could give up my toast, but then what would I slather my butter onto? ...
There's always your lover.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
It's not as simple as "butter is good for you", but here is a decent link:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ma...
I'm not sure what you've been eating instead of butter, but if it's margarine, by all means ditch the stuff and buy a pound of butter. Margarine is full of trans fats (or at least, it used to be), and while most nutrition studies are full of caveats and qualifications, it really is pretty damn near universal that the trans fats are just horrible for you. Margarine makers have been switching away from trans fats for some years, precisely because of this, though this announcement is the final nail in that coffin.
The actual healthiness of butter is still heavily qualified, so we don't really know. The biggest problem, as always, is calories: high-fat foods (deep fried or otherwise) make it really easy to consume more calories than you need. Eaten in moderation, with half an eye on the bottom line (you don't need to count if you have a bias towards mimimizing the junk), you can go ahead and eat pretty much whatever you like, in small amounts.
We still don't really have a good handle on exactly what is "healthy". Many people thrive on a variety of different diets, some of which include fried foods. There is no magic bullet; removing saturated fats didn't turn out to be it. (The history of that is complicated and ugly, involving some really horrific biases and conflicts of interest.) The real consensus is that if you eat a diverse diet with a very large proportion of vegetables and your body will not begrudge you the occasional deep-fried treat. The rest is too murky for specific advice, especially since most people aren't even following that simple plan, so it's hard to optimize further.
Saturated fats have actually been found to be perfectly healthy. This is at the core of the so-called "French Paradox". Everything we thought we knew about macronutrition was straight up fucking WRONG. Fat==good. Carbs==bad. Carbs make you gain weight. Fat makes you lose it. There is a reason Americans have been getting so fat--it is because we have been lied to, and we swallowed those lies, and swallowed and swallowed until we wound up drowning in our own blubber.
Neither are beets but we get sugar from them, all sugar is NOT from sugar cane.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Although many people don't think about lard in baked goods (other than maybe biscuits), it works quite well there. Oreos was made with lard until sometime in the '90s when the replaced it with -- wait for it -- partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. It looks like we've come full circle. (Yes, I know oreos aren't exactly the greatest baked good, but it can work elsewhere too.)
That said, you only listed tallow and lard. Don't forget about butter and rendered chicken fat (schmaltz), which is really good stuff (and is often a byproduct of cooking chicken).
On an unrelated note, Wisconsin is ahead of the curve on regulating trans fats courtesy of the butter lobby:
97.18 (4) The serving of colored oleomargarine or margarine at a public eating place as a substitute for table butter is prohibited unless it is ordered by the customer.
97.18 (5) The serving of oleomargarine or margarine to students, patients or inmates of any state institutions as a substitute for table butter is prohibited...
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.g...
Hell, it was illegal to sell margarine here for many years.
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=
I have no problem with her taking it. She paid for it. I imagine that had she not contributed to it and not been eligible to receive it, she still would have been broke, and probably not significantly later than when she went on the dole.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
She got way more than she paid in. Everybody except the rich does. That's because one of the dirty little secrets of social security and Medicare is that they're socialist programs. The whole thing about her "paying" for it b was cooked up to get libertarian types like her to accept the v help the desperately needed. If you'd had a decent history prof in college you'd know this
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Did what she paid for it cover the cost of what she got? Those SS and Medicare tax rates were mighty low back in the 60's. SS (with its early too low taxes) didn't start until 1935 and Medicare didn't even start until 1965. Those first generation SS and Medicare retirees made out like bandits. Nope, Ayn Rand almost certainly leached more out of them than she put in.
You got that right.. I simply have to have my palm oil popped pop-corn... MMMM, MMMM, good that stuff is...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Yeah because Republicans never grease the wheels of their donors.....moron.....
But, do they use trans-fat?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
you still don't understand the tragedy of commons do you?
or that your decisions impact others?
total individual freedom to be as stupid as you want regardless of the consequences to those around you is (ie, freedumb) is not sustainable, nor ethical.
not that that is surprising given your frequent shilling for fossil fuel industries on this site.
Pretty sure I know what tragedy of the commons is and you don't.
It refers to things that are considered no ones property being abused because doing so yields near zero benefits for the person making the effort. It has no bearing on people making individual choices that only have a direct affect on them.
BTW the solution to the tragedy of the commons, is to render them private property. You know sort of the way private dwellings are usually well maintained while public parks often become cesspools.
One could, if they could prove that HFCS should no longer be generally recognized as safe, as was done with trans-fats.
Your minor problem is going to be that natural foods do not contain substantial quantities of trans-fats. It's a quirk of the abiotic hydrogenation process that is used to modify naturally occurring unsaturated oils. Thus the substance is essentially artificial.
That's not the case with HFCS. The process that produces HFCS is artificial, but the very same sugars are in corn, sugarcane, fruits, berries, and various vegetables. You don't object to what the substance is -- you merely object to the form it is being provided in and how much is used.
A little thought experiment: would you have the FDA ban honey as well? It has virtually the same glucose to fructose ratio as HFCS 55 (glucose and fructose are the major sugars present at about 32 and 38% respectively), about 17% water, about 10% other sugars (especially maltose, which is a dimer of glucose), and about 3% other.
If not, then tell me the key difference between the two substances that makes one ban worthy and the other not.
Banning HFCS is simply a poor proxy for regulating that amount of sugars that are incorporated into foods. Yet we don't (currently) permit the FDA to regulate on that basis. If you want to have the argument, make the argument. Don't construct a make believe boogeyman and expect a community of nerds to buy into the myth without question.
Right now, a serving of food can contain .4g of transfats per serving and legally list "0g transfats" on the label.
Does the FDA regulation still allow this, or will partially hydrogenated oils of ANY amount be banned?
It will be interesting to see what coffee creamers like CoffeeMate will do, since they use a tiny 1 teaspoon serving size and are something like 50% trans fats so they can easily say "0 trans fats" on the label. Most people use something like a tablespoon and end up with a gram of a half of the transfats in their coffee.
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)
Not sure where you shop, but where I shop, HFCS isn't really that abundant. There's none on the lettuce/tomatoes/cucumber I had in the salad that I had for my lunch today. There wasn't any in the salad dressing. There wasn't any in the pasta I had along side the salad. There wasn't any in the home made muffins I had for a snack. There wasn't any in the Cheerios I had for breakfast. It's really not that hard to stay away from. Just read the labels of the food you buy.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ayn Rand's use of social security is proof that she's willing to overlook its ideological flaws for personal gain. Which makes her a hypocrite and a liar, and shows her beliefs to be entirely fictional. Which I suppose can be expected from a fiction writer, but not from the politically mindless drones that deify her.
She's the L. Ron Hubbard of moral and political philosophy. Which is fine if you want to profit from an ideology, but a poor substitute for critical thought and scholarship.
Well, they needed room for all the ethanol crops.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
It's like you weren't even paying attention!
I haven't eaten trans fat in decades and I haven't even been trying. What has transfat in it that you want?
Try finding fortune cookies without ... Looked everywhere and gave up. Selfishly I find myself cheering for the FDA ban because I want fortune cookies without trans fat.
You claim to have been able to avoid trans fat for decades without even trying. He wants to buy fortune cookies without trans fat. He claims that they don't exist. The ban means he will be able to buy fortune cookies without trans fat. Something he can not do currently.
That fortune cookies can be made without trans fat is completely irrelevant.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Yeah, not selling 64 oz sodas is just like USSR-era authoritarianism. You're a fucking genius.
I don't respond to AC's.
If you don't know that organic is a joke, then allow me to illuminate the issue for you. The inspections for whether food is or is not organic are basically non-existent. You file some paper work and the fact of the matter isn't audited.
Beyond that, what you actually have to comply with assuming you were audited is not what people think. Lets say I'm growing organic vegies of some description... mostly what I have to do is not use certain types of pesticide. That's pretty much it. The system is not a WHITE list that says "you can only use these pesticides" but is instead a BLACK list which lists prohibited pesticides. So new products which can come out at any time are inherently "organic approved" until cited otherwise.
Basically if it didn't come out of some guy's garden or off some Amish farm... it isn't organic. Its fake organic. Which is a way of getting idiots to pay more for the same thing.
Pen and Teller did a funny bit about how fucking gullible people are with this shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Its pathetic bullshit. If it is actually organic... great. But the USDA isn't going to ensure that because they don't police it and their standards for doing so are fucking dumb.
And on top of that, the merits of organic in the first place are pretty dubious.
I'm personally a bigger fan of green house growing... ideally hydroponic.
Why? Plants are about as healthy is possible. You have total control over everything. There are no pests so no need for pesticide at all. The best green houses maintain positive air pressure. There's no issue with "top soil", "erosion", "salt build up"... etc. And because I have total control over the nutrients the plants get, I can do all sorts of stuff to manipulate their growth on a DAY BY DAY basis. You can't change your nutrition on plant that is in the ground that fast. The last injection of stuff is still there.
And sure it is more expensive. BUT consider that it is easier to use harvesting robots in a fixed industrial green house and if set up properly you can grow all seasons in all climates. You can get fresh tomatoes in the middle of the Alaskan winter from a local farmer.
Fuck organic.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Which studies? Care to provide a link? I kinda always thought that all sugars are metabolized by 'normalizing' them to glucose and fructose. In case of sucrose it involves hydrolysis of one weak chemical bond, that produces glucose and fructose. HFCS simply skips that step.
The so called "nanny state" exists because we're all sick of corporations cutting corners to make a few bucks.
As a society we can collectively determine the standards at which businesses operate. It's called democracy, not a nanny state.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is what pisses me off every time HFCS comes up in a debate. You're not supposed to replace HFCS with sugar. You are supposed to replace it with fresher, less processed foods that don't need added sugars.
The problem I think was that 2 different anti-HFCS groups got some publicity at the same time. One was Dr what's-his-name who called HFCS "poison". But he really meant all sugars. It's just that HFCS was the main one found in everything at the time (because it's cheaper, easier to add since its liquid, and the corn supply is more stable than the sugar supply).
At the same time, the "Passover Coke" crowd was making noise about how much better CocaCola tasted with cane sugar, compared to HFCS. I agree that it does taste awesome, but that has nothing to do with health.
Unfortunately, these two movements collided in the public conscienceless and became "HFCS is really bad for you, and should be replaced with sugar". So now you have idiotic things like Raisin Bran that proudly says "No HFCS" on the box but is full of added sucrose. Raisins are supposed to be the sweetener in Raisin Bran, the only other ingredient should be bran.
Enironmental wise, the objection is likely based in the process of 3rd world countries cutting down forrests to plant monoculture palms for oil. Animals that relied on the forrest are then out of a habitat and since it's a monoculture the first disease or fungus that adapts specifically to those palm is going to wipe them out.
Healthwise I believe it's basically an issue of being an oil that is very high in saturated fat. Which is why it's so useful, the high saturated fat content allows it to be a solid at room temperature. Also one of the ways it is most commonly consumed is in fried dishes, the extreme heat of frying apparently changes the chemical content a bit and could make it less healthy than it would otherwise be. I don't know that it's particularly any worse than any of the possible substitutes.
I expect to read the news of that kind in a near future. A track was stopped at US-Mexican border. The shipment was marked as a medicine marijuana supplied for CVS by their business partner Cali Cartel. However a careful search found under few bags of marijuana --- carefully packaged Trans Fats!
We're winning the War On Drugs every day, right?
and if your behavior costs me with higher taxes and healthcare premiums for your care
I agree in principle with what you say but does that mean we should outright ban all risky activities? e.g. skateboarders are far more likely to break a leg than I am and thus present a potential burden on the medical system. There needs to be a rational line somewhere.
Sometimes we need to accept things as a donation to societal well-being, and by that I mean we don't all reduce to identical meatbags sitting in a cylinder being drip fed an ideal amount of perfectly healthy an nutritious proteins.
Everything we do somehow has an affect on other people and there's no way around it.
That was my point. They even banned alcohol at one point and reversed it when they realized how stupid it was.
Then your "point" is silly, because this is not analogous to prohibition. Nobody wants trans fat. There is not going to be a black market. The only advantage of trans fat is that it appears cheap (because the expensive externality of heart disease isn't readily apparent to stupid people). The overhead and risk or running a black market would remove the cost advantage.
Everything we thought we knew about macronutrition was straight up fucking WRONG.
Who is "we"? The NIH and USDA knew that they were lying through their fat fucking faces wen they told us that fat was bad for you and that eating fat would make you fat. They had no evidence to back up these statements. None. Same for cholesterol. They provided absolutely zero evidence that eating it was bad for you. Literally none.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"