Yeah, but how much raises it significantly? I mean, we have arsenic in our drinking water and have had since for ever. Eating fish will put trace amounts of mercury in your system. Oxygen technically kills us. The point is not that they are there, the point is what amount of consumption will make a non-negligible difference. You just said that any intake at all guarantees a heart attack. No it does not. In fact, many people who have consumed trans fats have healthy levels of cholesterol and will never get heart disease or a heart attack.

And it's not like other fats don't do the same thing. It's just that trans fats are much worse.



Less convince = more cost. It either makes a difference or it doesn't. You were the one who brought up the bottom line thing is the first place.


That sounds like a legal issue, not a market issue. The free market can't function with out good laws.


I thought it didn't make any cost difference?


You make trans fats out to be like mercury when they really aren't. Yes, they are bad for you. But eating things that are a little bad for you in moderation, may not have any significant long term health impact. Raising your bad cholesterol is bad. But it's not like eating mercury; you can bring it back down. You're making something that takes a lifestyle of careless consumption to hurt you and turning it into a deadly irreversible poison. It's bad, but you are over dramatizing it.

That's not to say we shouldn't discourage or control their use. It's only relativity recently that they become a big deal. I think it likely that their use will eventually go down weather we outlaw them or not, but at the very least we should step up awareness of the issue.

If it's such a big deal, why doesn't the FDA do it nationally..?

Up until a while ago they thought they were good for you. Jon'C is mostly right, just overly dramatic. A lot of people have been eating large amounts of trans fats which has lead to a larger number of deaths due to heart disease. Getting rid of them won't change the obesity problem though, and people will still get heart disease because many people simply have horrible eating habits. It would, however, help lower the number of people with high cholesterol in the country.

The FDA may do it nationally if there is enough pressure, but it's not bad enough that it raises the kind giant red flags it would take for them to ban trans fats.

Obi, disregarding the rest of your post, are you aware that trans-fats not only add a great amount of bad cholesterol, but that they also destroy a good deal of your body's good cholesterol?

You are wrong. According to the New England Journal of medicine: "On a per-calorie basis, trans fats appear to increase the risk of coronary heart disease more than any other macronutrient, conferring a substantially increased risk at low levels of consumption (1 to 3 percent of total energy intake)."


Again, you are wrong. They don't do the same thing. New England Journal of Medicine:

Trans fat behaves like saturated fat by raising the level of LDL (or "bad cholesterol", but unlike saturated fat it has the additional effect of decreasing levels of HDL (or "good cholesterol". The net increase in LDL/HDL ratio with trans fat is approximately double that due to saturated fat.
You are wrong.

"Because of these facts and concerns, the National Academy of Sciences has concluded there is no safe level of trans fat consumption. There is no adequate level, recommended daily amount or tolerable upper limit for trans fats. This is because any incremental increase in trans fat intake increases the risk of coronary heart disease."

Yes, I've only already made three posts in this thread indicating that ANY AMOUNT OF ARTIFICIAL TRANS FAT INTAKE INCREASES THE RISK OF HEART DISEASE PERMANENTLY, but if Obi_Kwiet was too blithe to notice my over-use of capital letters and italics I don't think he's going to notice anybody with restraint.

Sometimes I really want to fly joncy to the UK and buy him a beer.

All you people opposing this ban should go play with Chinese lead-painted toys.

Fair enough, but I was just talking about the alternative to veganism/vegetarianism also has its problems.



Growth hormones, the way in which we mass produce meat in this country for example.

Here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_hormone_controversy

Also this book deals with this issue quite well:
http://www.amazon.com/Diet-Dead-Planet-Business-Coming/dp/1595580840/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217164191&sr=8-1



I'm not too familiar with genetically modified plants, but there are other things wrong with non-organic plants that we eat, e.g. pesticides

Bull****. Natural pesticides are often just as carcinogenic as synthetic ones, sometimes more so. But that doesn't really matter, since the risk is minutely small.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/synthetic-v-natural-pesticides/

http://potency.berkeley.edu/text/handbook.pesticide.toxicology.pdf

Yeahhhh....

Too bad the wikipedia page you linked to is short on facts and long on panic. You know that beef from an uncastrated bull has ten times the hormone levels of a castrated steer that's being treated with testosterone, right? The page itself states that the EU conclusion was not "wholly motivated by scientific analysis" but rooted in consumer panic over BSE.


Too bad not using artificial pesticides on the outside of the plant stimulates production of natural pesticides on the inside, eh?

Edit: Beaten

Err sorry, but did you just realise that the FDA exists?

guys jonc doesnt know wut hes talking about hes not american

Actually come to think of it, no. Fingers are probably healthier.

Which was the fat that was created to be less harmful and then turned out to be at least equally bad? I thought it was transfats but it seems that transfats have been around for like a hundred years.

I will kiss every legislator that supports this.

People. The government isn't telling us what to eat. It's telling us not to use ONE ingredient which has been linked numerous times to heart problems and obesity. I mean c'mon people. You ***** and moan rising costs of health care yet you get pissed off at a bill that's supposed to help aleviate that??

Edit: I'm probably beaten on a lot of things on this post.

Interesterified fat

I'm going to see if I can dig up a report I read a while back that explained how health care costs for obese people are actually significantly less than for a healthier person-- because they die much sooner.

yes but those costs aren't amortized over their full lifespan.

if an obese person dies in their late 40s, that's an extra 15-20 years of work they're not doing.

That's some screwed up logic. Health care is more than just the total cost, it's the availability of medical resources at any given time. If the obese population keeps growing because of harmful substances used in commercial food, it means more resources are allocated to their treatment at the expense of other diseases which cannot be avoided by simple control. Makes more sense to avoid the harmful substances in the first place, no.

he is 2!

So, the situation here is kind of like instead of banning cigarettes, it would be like if they banned the needless additives that add zero flavor and buzz and only serve to be addictive?

Or like if they tried to ban lead paint! This is some ****ed up **** gents.

You can still have fatty ****. But the fatty **** will not contain a tasteless poison that someone was using to save some cash?

That offends me as a...

a...

an everything!

**** I have been up for like two days and this thread still doesn't make sense.

It has more to do with an automatic adverse reaction to government regulation than what they are actually regulating.

And I also have that reaction. But then, I don't huddle in fear of all the things out there that can hurt me.

I have a degree in biology and am one short of a degree in biochemistry. No one will miss trans fats. It must be frustrating for you guys to know so much less than Jon`C... that is the only reason I can think of for you to argue against this.

Trans-fats are an unnecessary artificial byproduct. They are bad for you. Your body doesn't know WTF to do with them. They generally do not occur in nature because the majority of nature cannot produce them.

guyz bradsh dosnt no wat hes talking abouthes not admin anymore

Thread title should be "Want the government to keep corporations from poisoining you? Oh who cares because you people will eat this **** even if it is made out of cancer and death."

Fixed.

Where in the Constitution says that the Government will not interfere with one's rights to eat poison? I must have missed this in my two years of studying it.

I find it interesting...the American attitude towards the government, when the masses will blindly state that a certain law is interfering with their constitutional right, and they completely forget the definition of a governed people.

That is not to say it can, very often under underhanded circumstances, that it could occur in reverse. But this is not the case as of now in this topic.

^ I was just kicking the massassi bee nest, since alot of people on here are *****ing about a positive regulation enforced by the government, turning it into a "violation" hubub.

I'm in a camp where I dont want to eat trans fats, but I also dont want to check and see if stuff has trans fats in it every time I go out and eat somewhere or buy something new at the grocery store. So ban them and I dont gotta worry about it. Perfect.

They'll still be there.

Sure, people should have a choice if the stuff they consume is unhealthy or not. However, this is something that isn't really taking away any of that right. This is an issue of what can be concidered basic-level consumables- food that is cheap and easily obtained, the stuff that ordinary people would get for the cheap or while on the run. This is stuff that children, teenagers, adults, and the elderly consume. It's not really a choice or a freedom if all of this stuff contains the same **** in it. Also, what harm will it do to replace it with a healthy alternative that wouldn't compromise the taste at all? Furthermore, and as previously stated by Spook, this ban wouldn't exactly be like banning cigarettes, it would be more like banning a harmful part that you won't even know has been replaced. You may have the choice as to what food you eat, but you really don't have a choice as to what additives that they have slipped in. And while this ban doesn't really help that choice, it at least makes the pre-existing absence of choice better to bear.

I do find it sad that the government has to do something that the corporations didn't have the heart to do. Hopefully, more states will follow.

Could someone explain to me why this isn't the FDA's job?

I was not aware of this, I was under the assumption that 0g meant exactly that. After looking around my house t almost all the boxes of everything frozen or prepackaged and maybe 1/3 of the things in my fridge did infact contain partially hydrogenated products. I'd consider myself to be a healthy eater, too.

That scares me. 1st of all that none of that appears on the nutritional facts, which I'm sure most people don't ever look at. I'm health-conscious and I only really check the trans fat (ironically) and the %DV of the saturated fat. And 2nd of all that its that present in our food. I don't stock up on twinkies and oreos, but I can only imagine how bad those are after I discovered that Special K granola bars have it too.

What choice do consumers have? Besides buying nothing but organic food and preparing every little thing from scratch.

Organic food has nothing to do with having trans fats. Just because something is "organic" does not make it healthier.

Er.. yes it does.

Trans fat is chemically modified. Organic food is grown without chemicals.

It's either a case of cost saving or genuine ignorance to the harm trans fats do. Since the public isn't aware, the prospect of saving money outweighs the slim chance of legal action. Corporations aren't ideal agents for public safety, at least until the public becomes aware and the lawsuits and boycotts begin. Which is unfortunate.

You'd be amazed how often that's false.

There are different grades of organic, and lots of products display the organic label which were in fact grown with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.

Besides, the types of foods that contain trans fats are prepackaged foods which I guarantee, for cost reasons, don't use organic ingredients.

Take the normal recipe for Jiff peanut butter. Substitute the normally cost-effective, high-yield peanuts with organically grown peanuts. Leave everything else the same. It is still loaded with trans fats.

Trans fats are a result of processing, not growing. The only way organic food is healthier is because people have been duped into thinking that it is, and as a result, organic products usually are healthier, but not because they come from organic crops.

Not a whole lot. Even this law is only banning the use of trans fats for restaurants and bakeries - fresh foods. For a variety of reasons there's basically no way the current market for prepared meals/frozen foods could sustain a ban on trans fats and if you really want to avoid them you should avoid prepared foods.

If you can cook, and you choose ingredients intelligently, you should have no problem avoiding them. Switch to butter. "Organic" is a scam, just avoid the economy of scale stuff.