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Uh-oh, Oreos
The Trans Fats Debate
By Kelly Burgess
It was a seven-day wonder. In what was possibly one of the most audacious moves ever made against a commercial food manufacturer, Stephen Joseph, a public interest lawyer, filed suit on May 1, 2003 against Nabisco to stop the sale of Oreo cookies in California. Within a week, he dropped it, before Kraft, the parent company of Nabisco, was even served.
Reaction, to put it mildly, was mixed. While many people who are trying to raise consumer awareness applauded Joseph, most pundits thought he was just another crazy Californian. Joseph, founder of BanTransFats.com, says he only did it to make consumers aware of the dangers of the practice of adding partially hydrogenated oils to foods.
These oils create a byproduct called trans fatty acids (or trans fats) that have been shown to raise bad cholesterol, lower good cholesterol and are suspected of contributing to diabetes, heart problems and a variety of other deadly ailments.
The U.S. Agriculture Department says that partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which contain trans fats, are present in about 40 percent of the food on grocery shelves. Food manufacturers have known about the dangers of trans fats since the 1950s and have been fighting regulations that would force them to inform consumers for nearly as long. After the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine said last year that trans fats shouldn't be consumed at all, the Food and Drug Administration immediately moved to have a line added to nutrition labels stating, "Intake of trans fat should be as low as possible."
Needless to say, food manufacturers are fighting the idea. They like hydrogenated oils, because they increase shelf life and are a cheap way to add to the pleasurable feel of food in the mouth. What is disturbing to many and what makes Oreos such a fitting target is that so much of the food we feed our children, thinking it's healthful, is loaded with trans fats.