By Richard Tardif
It’s been called the hidden killer, a manufactured substitute for true fat, the food industry’s Trojan Horse, and we’ve been eating it since the early 1900s, and Canada only banned it on September 15, 2018 despite almost 20 years of scientific knowledge that trans fats, with a corpse-like colour, giving us that “good consumer mouth feel” though tasteless, cheap to produce and lasts forever, is known to increase levels of “bad” cholesterol, raising the risk of heart disease, and contributing to other non-communicable diseases.
Wow. How’s that for a sensationalized and wordy lead?
These trans fats are sometimes linked to Dr. Ancel Keys, a Harvard-trained physiologist and epidemiologist, who’s studies linking saturated fats to heart disease changed the way we eat. Key’s experiments used saturated fats that had been artificially created from vegetable oils, often called trans fats, using a process called hydrogenation, a serendipitous product originally created in 1900 as a cheap form of candle wax as an alternative to the more expensive tallow. The first known product to hit the shelves was Crisco Shortening in 1911, and products using trans fats grew in popularity in the 1950s and beyond.
While trans fats today are being phased out, more slowly in some countries, these products are widely used in bakery products, take-out foods, your favourite restaurant, where until recently it usually did not have to be declared or labelled. They are cheap to produce, lowers the costs of products, and makes some foods easy to spread.
Author Maggie Stanfield, in her 2008 book Trans-Fat: The Time Bomb in Your Food, writes,
“It can be used as an alternative to butter – it’s a lot cheaper, is taste-free, gives what the industry calls ‘good consumer mouth feel’, and lasts a long time. A very long time. An American TV Programme recently featured a fairy cake made more than 25 years ago. It still looks perfect.”
The Task Force on Trans Fat in Canada first recommended to the federal government in 2005 that the trans fats should be reduced in foods eaten by Canadians.It is now illegal for manufacturers to add partially hydrogenated oils to foods sold in Canada, and products already on the shelfs can still be sold but must be removed by 2020.
The World Health Organization in May 2018 reported that 500,000 deaths from heart attacks can be linked to trans fats, and recommends a five-year, global elimination of all trans fats. Denmark banned trans fats 15 years ago, and since then the United States and more than 40 other higher-income countries have been working on legislating laws to remove them.
One example began in 2006, when New York City banned restaurants from serving food with trans fats. The same year the FDA required manufacturers to list trans fat content information on food labels. Many manufacturers agreed and cut back, and studies showed trans fat levels in the blood of middle-aged US adults fell by nearly 60 per cent by 2010. Denmark has reported similar findings.
How do you know something has trans fats in it? Check on the label for anything Hydrogenated.
Just. Eat. Right.
Richard Tardif is a personal fitness trainer, health & fitness author, speaker and an award-winning journalist. Richard’s first book Stop the Denial: A Case for Embracing the Truth about Fitness, challenges, surprises, and inspires you to embrace a fitness lifestyle that will work in achieving your individual goals.
