The news is this this headline: “FDA to ban artery-clogging trans fats.”
Still, as bad as these industrial-created hydrogenated oils are, I wonder when the media and the medical profession (and Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon) will stop describing foods as things as if they are ingested and travel to the arteries, like hair in the bathroom plumbing. Now on to the article with this quote:
The advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest first petitioned FDA to ban trans fats nine years ago. The group’s director, Michael Jacobson, says the move is “one of the most important lifesaving actions the FDA could take.”
As always, the CSPI and Michael Jacobson are at the forefront of any movement to ban anything deemed ban-worthy in the name of “protecting the public.” Trans fats are, in the estimation of those of us who travel in real food circles, a tragedy of the politicized-industrial system. The history of these industrial products are always tangled with political vibrations that involve subsidies and crony capitalism.
Here is a blog post of mine from 2006: “The Health Nazis Brought Us Trans Fats. Now They Taketh Away.” I will embed the entire post here, because it is very worth repeating.
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I was impressed to see the great headline in the Wall Street Journal today: The Bloomberg Diet: The nanny state reaches into the kitchen. Accordingly, the article notes that Michael Jacobson’s Center for Science in the Public Interest, an activist, consumer advocacy group that has been striving for the trans fat ban in New York, is the same organization that helped to bring us trans fat in the first place. (Emphasis mine.)
Before other cities decide to regulate diets absent a safety issue, they might also consider that some of the same people now pushing for a trans fat ban once recommended the ingredient as a substitute for another health scare: saturated fats. Twenty years ago, Mr. Jacobson’s CSPI launched a public relations blitz against fast food joints for using palm oil to cook fries. The group claimed victory when restaurants started using partially hydrogenated oil instead. In 1988, a CSPI newsletter declared that “the charges against trans fat just don’t hold up. And by extension, hydrogenated oils seem relatively innocent.” Today, Mr. Jacobson is claiming trans fats kill 30,000 people a year. We wonder if he feels guilty.
The American Heart Association opposes the trans fat ban, and why? Because it will likely force the use of oils that are high in saturated fats. And yes, restaurants might have to revert to the use of palm oil, that substance that CSPI launched an attack against two decades ago. The AHA takes the sober view, recommending that restaurants take the time to look for healthy alternatives.
Says Jacobson of his trans fat victory: “If trans-fat labeling in the supermarket was the beginning of the end of trans fat, New York’s move today is the middle of the end of trans fat.”
I’ve long noted the oncoming war on lifestyle, and especially dietary supplements. Anything that serves a purpose for any individual, whether real or imagined, is under attack. What does the CSPI have next on its agenda? They are busy trying to convince the FDA to regulate energy drinks as well as all “functional” foods. The safety hazard being claimed by CSPI lawyers is that the energy drink products are being used some alcohol drinkers as they “mistakenly rely on “energy” drinks to mitigate the effects of alcoholic beverage consumption. Drinkers may experience a placebo effect, and dangerously assume that they can drive a car, or drink even more alcohol without becoming further inebriated.” Thus we must regulate it at the point of manufacture. These advocacy types don’t ever go away; they just multiply. And each time, they replace something bad with something worse.
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So you can blame your “clogged” plumbing, and potentially, an entire generation of health carnage on the fact that the industrial food machine has built an almost insurmountable system of rent-seeking decrees based on politically-motivated junk science that has fully intended to do you harm. I do not subscribe to the the feel-good notion that these actions are the “tyranny of good intentions,” or that the fallout – such as entire generations of health disasters – is somehow an acceptable downside of otherwise useful political actions upstream. This is intentional strategy on the part of the political-industrial machine to string together a system of uninterrupted profitability undergirded by political favors performed by a plethora of crony-corporate megalomaniacs who apply political clout to gain advantage in the marketplace and build their revolving-door resume. The hacks at the top of the crony capitalism org chart transition between the government sector to the pharmaceutical-medical-industrial food sector in an entirely purposeful way.
Lastly, the article makes this point:
Dr. Leon Bruner, chief scientist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said in a statement his group estimates that food manufacturers have voluntarily lowered the amount of trans fats in food products by 73 percent.
There is no mention, here, of why this has occurred: because of the free market that gets results in spite of the barriers, monopolies, wayward regulations, and political power plays that are the result of an artificial entity known as the state. That free market consists of of dissenters, medical heretics, real foodists, and other enemies of the conventional wisdom who write, blog, speak, and research their way to the truth in spite of the fact that an entire gatekeeper system works against them.
All of the assorted ‘truth movements’ have dedicated endless unpaid time and energy to informing the public, and that is why food manufacturers have had to buckle under the pressure and start retreating toward a new sanity.