CHAPTER 2
THE GREAT MARGARINE MISTAKE
“Avoid fried foods, which angry up the blood.”
I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. And although I know that you cannot go home again—that you can never recapture your youth—still, there were certain things that I had assumed would always be there.
For example, from the ages of 13 to 18, I was a Baltimore Colts season ticket holder. Every year, three friends (Jimmy, Jack, and Robert) and I would scrape up the $35 it took to buy a season ticket for the seven home games. On Sundays, we would take the bus down to Memorial Stadium: “the world’s largest outdoor insane asylum.” Baltimore loved their Colts. We couldn’t have supported them more. Then, with little warning, they were gone—off to Indianapolis in the middle of the night with their memorabilia crammed into the back of a Mayflower truck. Loyalty, apparently, could be a one-way street.
Another Baltimore staple were crabs from the Chesapeake Bay. During the summer we would go to a local crab house and crack crabs flavored with Old Bay Seasoning made by Baltimore’s own McCormick & Company. Then, due to overfishing, the crabs were gone. Now Baltimore’s crabs are flown up from Texas.
There was another tradition that I could always count on—something that won the “Best of Baltimore Award” in 2011 and has been featured on The View as well as the Food Network’s Rachael Ray and The Best Thing I Ever Ate. Something that every Baltimorean adores: Berger cookies.
Slathered with fudge over a modicum of shortbread, Berger cookies have been a Baltimore tradition since George and Henry Berger brought them over from Germany in 1835. Today, Berger cookies are made by a little bakery in the Cherry Hill section of Baltimore that, in 2012, had annual sales of $2.5 million, 98 percent of which was from Berger cookies. Amazing, when you consider that most of these cookies are distributed locally.
Unfortunately, like the Baltimore Colts and Chesapeake Bay crabs, Baltimore’s Berger cookies might also soon be a thing of the past. Unless the owner of the bakery, Charles DeBaufre, Jr., changes his recipe, the FDA will ban them. The reason: Berger cookies are made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, so they’re loaded with trans fats. DeBaufre has tried baking them with cooking oils and shortenings free of trans fats, without success. “We’ve tried it and trust me, it’s nasty,” he says. “The texture’s just not there. It’s an entirely different product.” If DeBaufre cannot come up with an alternative recipe soon, his cookie and his business will be gone.
THE THREAT TO BALTIMORE’S Berger cookies is explained by the most common reason that Americans die: heart disease, a phenomenon of the modern era. In the early 1900s, most people died from bacterial and viral infections. But, during the 20th century, advances like antibiotics, vaccines, safer drinking water, and purer foods have allowed us to live about 30 years longer—long enough to die from heart disease. To understand why, we first need to understand what makes the heart so vulnerable.
The heart is a muscle that, like any other muscle, needs the constant flow of blood, which supplies oxygen. Two major arteries, called coronary arteries, do this. If either of these arteries is blocked, then blood flow is disrupted, causing damage to the heart muscle and occasionally sudden death (that is, a heart attack). When researchers studied these blockages, they found cholesterol, a substance made by the body that is an essential component of cell membranes. They also found triglycerides, the main constituent of body fat. Doctors would eventually call the disease atherosclerosis, literally meaning “hardening of the arteries.”
The next question was what, if anything, could be done about it. In 1913, Nikolay Anichkov offered the first ray of hope. Working in the Czar’s Military Medicine Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, Anichkov found that rabbits fed large quantities of milk and egg yolks—foods rich in cholesterol—developed atherosclerosis. He reasoned that heart disease could be controlled by diet. Eat less cholesterol, he said, and you’ll live longer.
By the mid-1950s, Ancel Keys argued that cholesterol wasn’t the only problem. Keys studied people’s diets in seven different countries. He found that residents of Japan and Crete had very little heart disease, while those living in Finland—where the amount of fat in the diet was greater—suffered a higher incidence. He urged Americans to restrict their fat intake, becoming the first person to use the term “heart-healthy diet.” Despite the clarity of his recommendation, Keys admitted that “direct evidence on the effect of diet on human atherosclerosis is very little and likely to remain so for some time.”
Unlike Anichkov, whose work had little influence, Keys had clout. He chaired the International Society of Cardiology for the World Health Organization, was consultant to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, and, along with his wife, wrote several best-selling books on diet and disease. In 1961, Ancel Keys appeared on the cover of Time magazine urging Americans to eat less fat and less cholesterol. That same year, the American Heart Association set a recommended limit of 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol a day. Because a single egg contains about 200 milligrams of cholesterol, egg consumption dropped 30 percent. “In America, we no longer fear God,” said David Kritchevsky, a scientist at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. “We fear fat.”
Although scientific data on the relationship between fat consumption and human health remained, at best, ambiguous, the United States federal government was determined to impose clarity. In 1968, Senator George McGovern launched the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. McGovern and his wife had recently tried diet guru Nathan Pritikin’s low-fat diet and exercise program. Although McGovern had bailed out on the diet quickly, he remained committed to its mantra.
In 1977, McGovern’s committee published its unprecedented and, according to one historian, “revolutionary” report. What made it revolutionary was that it was written by a group of political activists with no specific training or expertise in the field of nutrition. The author of the report was Nick Mottern, a labor reporter for the Providence Journal. Mottern had no background in science, nutrition, or human health. So, he turned to the one man he believed could help him decide what diet was right for the American public: Mark Hegsted, a Harvard School of Public Health nutritionist who unconditionally embraced the benefits of restricting dietary fats, even though he admitted that it was an extreme position. Mottern’s report, titled “Dietary Goals for the United States,” stated that Americans should cut their total fat intake to less than 30 percent of total calories.
The McGovern committee guidelines would have quietly died the death they deserved had it not been for Carol Tucker Foreman, a consumer activist who had recently been appointed U.S. Department of Agriculture assistant secretary of Food and Consumer Services. Foreman decided to elevate the committee’s recommendations to official government policy. Undeterred by the lack of clarity from scientific studies, Foreman marshaled forth. “I have to eat and feed my children three times a day,” she told a group of scientists, “and I want you to tell me what your best sense of the data is right now.” Unfortunately, the “best sense of the data” depended on whom you asked. Scientists just didn’t know enough to make a clear recommendation. But the USDA recommendations were clear, even if the data weren’t. Restriction of dietary fat became official government policy.
After Mottern’s report was made public, McGovern’s staffers decided that it might be a good idea to get input from more than one scientist. So, they opened up their committee hearings to others. One of the first to appear was Robert Levy, a senior scientist from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Levy testified that no one really knew whether lowering cholesterol or fat intake would do anything to prevent heart disease, and that his institute was in the midst of a $300 million study to find out. But Levy also knew that the horse was out of the barn. “The good senators came out with the guidelines and then called on us to get advice,” he lamented.
Next to argue against the committee’s report was Pete Ahrens, a metabolism researcher at New York’s famous Rockefeller Institute, who, in 1969, had headed a committee that came to the same conclusions as Robert Levy. Even the American Medical Association weighed in, protesting that the diet proposed by McGovern’s committee had the “potential for harmful effects.” But it was too late. According to Gary Taubes, in a Science magazine article titled, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat,” “It was George McGovern’s [Committee]—and, to be precise, a handful of McGovern’s staff members—that almost single-handedly changed nutritional policy in this country and initiated the process of turning the dietary fat hypothesis into dogma.” Although they didn’t know it at the time, Americans were now unwitting test subjects in a national experiment to see if restricting dietary fat reduced the incidence of heart disease.
PERHAPS NO PRODUCT SUFFERED government restrictions more than butter, whose origins date back to the time that humans domesticated animals, about 10,000 years ago. Butter is made by separating cream from milk and churning it into a solid, which is naturally a light yellow color. When Keys and McGovern made their definitive, if ill-founded, recommendations, they caused Americans to prefer a product that was first commissioned in 1869 by Napoleon III of France. Napoleon needed something cheaper than butter to feed his army. The first to step forward was a French chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, who invented something he called oleomargarine. Unlike butter, which was made from animal fat, margarine was made from vegetable oils. Also unlike butter, margarine was stark white, not light yellow. Cheaper, but similar in taste and texture to butter, margarine soon became one of the most popular food products in the world.
In 1886, the National Dairy Association in the United States fought back, influencing the federal government to pass the Oleomargarine Act, which imposed a tax on anyone selling margarine. To avoid the tax, some margarine makers dyed their product yellow and sold it as butter. Incensed, the dairy industry used its influence to prohibit margarine makers from dying their product. Manufacturers responded by selling margarine with a yellow dye on the side. If consumers wanted their margarine to be yellow, all they had to do was put it in a bowl and add the dye themselves. Three states—Vermont, New Hampshire, and West Virginia—went one step further, passing laws that margarine had to be dyed pink. The margarine tax laws were repealed in 1950, the dye laws in 1955. (Major dairy states like Minnesota and Wisconsin didn’t repeal their dye laws until 1967.) Now, margarine could be sold as a yellow, spreadable product free of a federal tax. Advertisers were quick to promote its benefits over butter.
In 1911, the average American ate about 19 pounds of butter a year compared with only 1 pound of margarine. By 1957, with margarine now being offered as the “heart-healthy” alternative, Americans were eating 8.5 pounds of margarine a year, about the same as butter. “The massive advertising of health claims for margarine transformed a generally disreputable product of inferior quality and flavor into a great commercial success,” wrote William Rothstein, in his book Public Health and the Risk Factor. Even Eleanor Roosevelt jumped in. “That’s what I spread on my toast,” she said in a 1959 television commercial for Good Luck margarine. By 1976, margarine consumption had increased to 12 pounds a year, three times that of butter. But despite the switch from butter to the supposedly “heart-healthy” margarine, the incidence of heart disease in the United States continued to rise. It took decades for policy makers to understand why margarine was actually the “heart-unhealthy” alternative.
During the next 20 years, three major studies involving 300,000 people and costing about $100 million determined the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease. The answer: There wasn’t any. Nonetheless, despite the clarity of these studies, official government policy remained unchanged. Walter Willett, a Harvard epidemiologist who had headed one of the studies, was incensed. “Scandalous,” he remarked. “They say, ‘You really need a high level of proof to change the recommendations,’ which is ironic because they never had a high level of proof to set them.”
Ancel Keys and the McGovern committee had been wrong about dietary fats because they had assumed that all fats were the same. They hadn’t accounted for the different types of fats, specifically, saturated fats, unsaturated fats, cis fats, and—most important—trans fats. In the years that followed, Americans would pay a high price for their ignorance.
TO UNDERSTAND WHERE Keys and McGovern had gone wrong, we’re going to need a brief refresher course in high school chemistry for the few people who might have forgotten it. Just kidding. Everyone’s forgotten it. You forget it the minute the test is over. But to understand what words like “saturated” and “unsaturated” and “trans fats” mean, we need to understand some of the chemistry behind them. It’s really not that hard. So hang in there.
Fats are composed of three different types of atoms: carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). Carbon atoms, which form the backbone of fats, have four binding sites (areas where one atom attaches to another). If all four sites are bound, then the carbon atom’s binding sites are said to be saturated. The fat shown below is a saturated fat. Foods rich in saturated fats include butter, lard, coconut oil, palm oil, mayonnaise, and fish oils; dairy products like cream, cheeses, milk, sour cream, and ice cream; and processed meats like bacon, sausage, salami, steak, ham, ground beef, and luncheon meats.
Saturated fat
Sometimes, however, a carbon atom will share two binding sites with another carbon atom (such as in the carbon atoms pictured in bold in the example below). Because it’s still possible for these carbon atoms to share one of their binding sites with another atom (like a hydrogen atom), the fat is said to be unsaturated. The fat shown below is an unsaturated fat. Foods rich in unsaturated fats include olive oil, salmon, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, avocados, olives, fatty fish, margarine, natural peanut butter, and pumpkin, sunflower, flax, and chia seeds.
Unsaturated Fat
By the early 1980s, when the relative quantities of these two different types of fats were clear, several studies had shown that saturated fats increased the risk of heart disease. These studies gave birth to the notion that unsaturated fats were good and saturated fats were evil. In response, two groups made it their mission to eliminate saturated fats from the American diet. It wasn’t until much later that Americans realized what they’d done wrong.
In 1984, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) launched its “saturated fat attack,” targeting companies that fried or baked foods using animal fats and tropical oils that were rich in saturated fats (like coconut oil and palm oil). A year later, Phil Sokolof—after suffering a near fatal heart attack—launched the National Heart Savers Association (NHSA), spending $15 million of his own money to force companies to eliminate saturated fats from fast foods. In 1988, Sokolof sent thousands of letters to companies urging them to stop using saturated fats. When his letters were ignored, he took out full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. “Who is poisoning America?” his advertisements blared, “Food processors are by using saturated fats!” The text that followed was no less subtle. “We have contacted all of the major food processors beseeching them to stop using these potentially dangerous ingredients…Our pleas have gone unanswered. Obviously these companies have more pressing priorities than your health. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE…We implore you. Do not buy products containing coconut or palm oil. YOUR LIFE MAY BE AT STAKE.”
CSPI’s “saturated fat attack” and NHSA’s letter-writing campaign targeted every major company that prepared foods using shortenings or oils high in saturated fats, including Archway, Borden, Frito-Lay, General Foods, Hardee’s, Heinz, Hostess, Keebler, Kellogg’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lance, McDonald’s, McKee Baking Company, Nabisco, Pepperidge Farm, Pillsbury, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Ralston Purina, Roman Meal, Roy Rogers, Specialty Bakers, Stouffer’s, Sunshine, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. By the late 1980s, virtually every major cookbook and every reputable dietitian promoted diets low in saturated fats, efforts that were wholeheartedly supported by the FDA, the World Health Organization, the USDA, and the National Institutes of Health. The solution to the problem of heart disease appeared to be obvious: Replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats. Americans were told to eat margarine instead of butter. Unfortunately, margarine contained a type of fat (trans fats) that was far more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined.
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT TRANS FATS ARE, let’s go back to our description of an unsaturated fat. In the diagram below, look at the carbon atoms shown in bold. The hydrogen atoms connected to those two carbon atoms are both on the same side. This is called being in the “cis configuration.” Cis, in Latin, means “on this side of.” When both hydrogen atoms are on the same side, they repel each other, causing a bend in the molecule. This bend makes it harder to stack one molecule on top of another. Molecules that don’t stack well are hard to crystallize or, said another way, they are hard to make into a solid. As a result, cis unsaturated fats are invariably liquid oils, like canola and sunflower oils.
Cis-Unsaturated Fat
Sometimes, as shown in the example on this page, the hydrogen atoms of an unsaturated fat are on the opposite side. Now the hydrogen atoms are said to be in a trans configuration. Trans, in Latin, means “on the other side.” When hydrogen atoms are on the opposite side, the molecule is straight. Now it’s much easier to stack one molecule on top of another. Molecules that stack neatly and tightly are easy to crystallize, converting a liquid into a solid. That’s why common vegetable shortenings, even though they are made of vegetable oils, stay solid in a can on your kitchen shelf.
For the most part, large quantities of trans fats are not found in nature. They are created when hydrogen atoms are purposely added to unsaturated vegetable oils, a process called hydrogenation. The end product is typically referred to as a “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.” The designation partially means that the product isn’t completely saturated or, said another way, is still unsaturated. It also means that the product is loaded with trans fats.
Trans-Unsaturated Fat (or Trans Fat)
Americans first became aware of unsaturated fats containing large quantities of trans fats in the 1980s. But in truth, these products were actually born more than a hundred years earlier in the form of one of America’s most popular cooking products.
ON FEBRUARY 27, 1901, Wilhelm Normann became the first person to hydrogenate liquid oils, a process he called “fat hardening.” On August 14, 1902, Normann was awarded German patent #141,029. Trans fats were born. One year later, after Normann was granted a patent in England, Joseph Crosfield & Sons built a large-scale manufacturing plant in Warrington, England. By 1909, Crosfield was producing 6.6 million pounds of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils every year. Five years later, more than 20 plants worldwide were hydrogenating vegetable oils into a solid state—all loaded with trans fats.
The same year that Joseph Crosfield & Sons started mass-producing solid oils, Procter & Gamble acquired the U.S. rights to Normann’s patent, originally planning to use it to make soaps and candles. Soon Procter & Gamble scientists figured out how to use Normann’s method to convert cottonseed oil from a liquid to a solid. When he realized that his company had created a cooking product like no other, William Procter walked into the office of a man who had been selling cooking oils for most of his life, tossed a hard white block onto his desk, and said, “There is some cottonseed oil.” They called it Crisco, a contraction of Crystallized cottonseed oil.
For many reasons, the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats in Crisco were superior to every other cooking oil or shortening ever invented: (1) Trans fats are more stable when exposed to oxygen, so they have much longer shelf lives than animal fats like butter; (2) trans fats burn only at extremely high temperatures, so cooking oils don’t cause much smoke and don’t need to be changed as frequently—a godsend to any employee who works all day over a fryer; (3) trans fats have a neutral flavor, so they don’t interfere with the taste of any food; (4) trans fats look so much like butter that they can easily replace it; and (5) trans fats are extraordinarily cheap. Starting in the 1930s, they were made from oils left over from crushing soybeans used to make animal feed. Finally, because of their variations in texture, structure, lubrication, and aeration, semisolid fats like Crisco allowed bakers to make cakes fluffier, cookies crumblier, crackers crispier, pies flakier, chicken crunchier, and croissants more delicate.
Procter & Gamble knew they had a gold mine on their hands. They sold Crisco attached to cookbooks that contained a variety of recipes, all of which required Crisco for baking and frying. They marketed Crisco with phrases like, “It’s all vegetable! It’s digestible!” and “An Absolutely New Product, a Scientific Discovery Which Will Affect Every Kitchen in America.” Also, because Crisco is kosher, they promoted it with this tagline: “The Hebrew Race has been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco.” In the 1940s, animal fats like butter accounted for two-thirds of all fat consumption in the United States; by the early 1960s, with the increasing use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats, that ratio had reversed.
According to Judith Shaw in her book, Trans Fats, two events launched the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (trans fat) industry. The first was legislation passed by Congress in 1956 to build an interstate highway system. This enabled fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Chili’s to spread across the country. Because partially hydrogenated vegetable oils had a long shelf life, cookies, french fries, fried chicken, and fried fish could now be transported across the country without preservation. The second piece of legislation that was a boon to trans fats passed on September 6, 1958: the Food Additives Amendment. The amendment, which was intended to protect Americans from potentially dangerous additives, stated, “A food shall be deemed to be adulterated if it bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health.” Unfortunately, food additives used before 1958 (like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils), didn’t require FDA approval. Trans fats had been grandfathered in.
In the 1980s, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils became the single most popular product for all baking and frying. By 2001, hydrogenation became the fourth largest food manufacturing process in the world. Also in 2001, the CDC released its data on the annual incidence of heart disease in the United States: 12.6 million Americans had coronary artery disease; 5.4 million had medical procedures for heart disease; and 500,000 people died from heart attacks and related strokes. The price tag for heart disease was about $300 billion a year.
By pummeling companies that used tropical oils like coconut and palm oil and animal fats like butter—all of which were high in what were believed to be evil saturated fats—CSPI and NHSA had inadvertently caused Americans to use a far more dangerous product: trans fats. Suddenly products like margarine, which contained 25 percent trans fats, became the “healthy alternative.” By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of products were made using partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Because they were cheap, kosher, and promoted as heart-healthy alternatives, they flew off the shelves.
IN 1981, A GROUP OF Welsh researchers sounded the first alarm, publishing a paper claiming that the trans fats contained in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were linked to heart disease. Nine years later, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, two Dutch researchers published findings supporting the Welsh study. For the first time, Americans were starting to realize that not all unsaturated fats were good for you. In 1993, a study done by Harvard researchers showed that if people replaced just 2 percent of the energy from trans fats with other unsaturated fats, they could decrease their risk of heart disease by 33 percent; another study showed that the same decrease in trans fat intake could lessen the risk of heart disease by 53 percent. The Harvard School of Public Health later estimated that eliminating trans fats from the American diet would prevent 250,000 heart attacks and related deaths every year!
Unlike studies of total fat, total cholesterol, and unsaturated fats—where findings had been contradictory or inconclusive—no researcher has ever published a paper showing that trans fats are anything other than one of the most harmful products ever made. As researchers got better at understanding that not all unsaturated fats were the same, the problem with trans fats became painfully clear.
WHAT ABOUT CHOLESTEROL? Wasn’t cholesterol found in the coronary arteries of people suffering from atherosclerosis? Although it is true that cholesterol, which is an essential component of cells, was found in the fatty streaks that blocked coronary arteries, one particular type of cholesterol was present: low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, otherwise known as bad cholesterol. The reason that health advocates warned against products that were high in saturated fats was that saturated fats increase LDL cholesterol. But what these advocates didn’t realize at the time was that there are two different types of LDL cholesterol. There’s the big, fluffy type, which isn’t harmful, and the small, dense type—called very low-density lipoprotein or vLDL cholesterol—which is quite harmful. Saturated fats increase the not-so-bad type of LDL cholesterol but don’t increase the very bad vLDL cholesterol.
Another type of cholesterol is actually good for you. Called high-density lipoprotein or HDL cholesterol, it removes vLDL from coronary arteries and transports it to the liver where it can be eliminated from the body. Saturated fats neither increase nor decrease the quantity of HDL cholesterol in the blood.
So, in summary, neither saturated fats nor certain types of cholesterol are necessarily bad for you. Trans fats are a different story. Not only do trans fats dramatically increase vLDL, the worst kind of cholesterol, but they also dramatically decrease HDL, the helpful cholesterol. For that reason, in 2006, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine declared, “On a per calorie basis, trans fats appear to increase the risk of coronary heart disease more than any other macronutrient.”
ALTHOUGH THE FOOD AND ADDITIVES AMENDMENT had stated that additives used before 1958 did not require FDA approval, one clause in the bill did allow the FDA to act: “Foods must be examined in the light of current scientific information if their use is to be continued.” Health activists first petitioned the FDA to limit the use of trans fats in 1994. In 1999, five years later, the FDA finally announced that it would devise a plan to limit the consumption of trans fats. Three years passed. Nothing happened. On July 10, 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) made a statement designed to shock the FDA into action. The IOM reported that no amount of trans fats was safe, recommending an “upper intake level of zero.” At the time that the IOM drew a line in the sand, 95 percent of cookies, 80 percent of frozen breakfast foods, 75 percent of snacks and chips, 70 percent of cake mixes, and 50 percent of cereals contained trans fats.
Public advocacy groups eventually regretted their role in inadvertently promoting unsaturated fats containing trans fats. In 2004, the executive director of CSPI said, “Twenty years ago, scientists, including me, thought trans fats were innocuous. Since then, we’ve learned otherwise.” A year later, Walter Willett, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, told the New York Times, “A lot of people had made their careers telling people to eat margarine instead of butter. When I was a physician in the 1980s, that’s what I was telling people to do and unfortunately we were often sending them to their graves prematurely.”
WHEN HEALTH ADVOCATES THOUGHT cholesterol or total fat or saturated fats increased the risk of heart disease, they simply launched public relations campaigns to inform consumers. Trans fats, on the other hand, were so clearly dangerous that their presence in foods launched government efforts to ban them. It started in Europe.
On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent.
On January 1, 2006—12 years after it had first been petitioned to act—the FDA finally announced its plan, which required manufacturers of packaged foods to list the quantity of trans fats on every nutrition label. By the end of the year, 84 percent of Americans had heard of trans fats and at least half could correctly identify their health risks. Kentucky Fried Chicken voluntarily eliminated trans fats followed by Applebee’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell, and Starbucks. Some of the nation’s largest food suppliers, like Kraft, Sodexo, and Frito-Lay, which makes Doritos, Tostitos, and Cheetos, also eliminated their use of trans fats. By 2008, the amount of trans fats in prepared foods had decreased by half. By 2012, trans fats had been eliminated from an estimated 10,000 products and had been banned from restaurants in at least 13 U.S. jurisdictions. New York City, for example, asked 20,000 restaurants and 14,000 food suppliers to eliminate their use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats.
There is, however, one unfortunate loophole. If products contain less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, the FDA allows manufacturers to claim 0 grams of trans fats on the nutrition label. Because many products contain slightly less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, it’s still possible to consume more than the 2-gram limit of trans fats a day set by the American Heart Association. For example, crème-filled sponge cakes contain 0.46 gram of trans fats but are listed as having 0 grams on the label. And microwave popcorn, which contains 0.25 gram of trans fats, also is listed as having 0 grams. Trans fats are also still contained in some brands of margarines and coffee creamers. And they’re still contained in Berger cookies. The key to avoiding the problem of hidden trans fats is to look for the phrase “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the nutrition label.
EVERY FEW YEARS the Society of German Chemists gives out its Wilhelm Normann Award for outstanding contributions to fat research and fat science. Ironic, given that Normann’s process for converting unsaturated fats to trans fats has probably caused more disease and death than any other man-made chemical reaction in history.
SO, WHAT’S THE TAKE-HOME LESSON? Could any of this have been avoided? Again, as was the case with painkillers, it’s all about the data. In the late 1970s, when the McGovern committee stated that total fat intake should be less than 30 percent of total calories, data weren’t available to make such a strong recommendation. Similarly, when recommendations about which type of fat should be preferred were being made, studies were conflicting. Although several studies showed that saturated fats might increase the rate of heart disease, one Welsh study published at the same time showed exactly the opposite: Unsaturated fats increased the risk of heart disease, dramatically. This conflict should have at least given us pause. But it didn’t. Ill-founded promises had been let out of the box, and American tables proudly served margarine as the “heart-healthy” alternative to butter when it was exactly the opposite.