"US moves to ban trans fats in foods"

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  • BillRicks1
    BillRicks1 Posts: 473 Member
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    As always, it is the end consumer (you) who is responsible for what goes in your body not the FDA or any agency. You have always had choices. Read the label and choose wisely!
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
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    As always, it is the end consumer (you) who is responsible for what goes in your body not the FDA or any agency. You have always had choices. Read the label and choose wisely!

    Restaurants don't usually have ingredient labels. Same with many foods prepared by someone other than myself. It seems easier to ban trans fats, than to force ingredient labels on all prepared foods.
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
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    I really think people have this "want to have my cake and eat it too" mentality with their fast food. They want their delicious tasting junk to be "healthy" too. I think this is ridiculous behavior. Just try to prove to me that banning trans fats will have any discernible impact on people's overall health when they're still eating crap food.

    The article says "a ban could prevent 7,000 deaths and 20,000 heart attacks in the US each year". Obviously this would be based on a projection derived from current figures re: consumption and disease. But true results would be impossible to know unless the ban were enacted. So, saying "prove" it to me before you ban is an impossible request.
  • Dragonwolf
    Dragonwolf Posts: 5,600 Member
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    My thought is I should be in control of what I want to do with my food, what I want to eat and how I want to fix it. Even if you personally feel it is not right for you, it is not right to force that opinion on others. I personally don't like cigarette smoking and don't like being around people who smoke, but a smoker chooses that, and it is his/her business, not mine. Just because we don't like something, we should not cheer when other people's rights are affected.

    Technically speaking, it's not a ban. The FDA wants to remove partially hydrogenated oils and other sources of artificial trans fats from the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list. It effectively "bans" them, because a company has to prove that the inclusion of a non-listed item is safe (under existing law), but it's not a ban in the sense that they got Congress to pass a new law to make it illegal to use.

    As for the removal of it from the GRAS list, that's actually not an easy feat. It has to be basically proven beyond reasonable doubt that the item is harmful, and that's what's been done. Even then, there are still a lot of barriers to it actually happening, including lobbying from people and stonewalling from Congress (via riders and slashed funding) to keep an item on the list.

    http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/05/10/1982851/fda-slow-to-regulate-harmful-substances/

    http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/health/fda-trans-fats/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
  • Showcase_Brodown
    Showcase_Brodown Posts: 919 Member
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    Great, because banning things always turns out well.
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
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    Thoughts are....

    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1132342-fda-taking-first-steps-to-banning-artificial-trans-fats
    Oh, my apologies. I had no awareness of this being posted previously.

    No need to apologize. Many articles are posted more than once. My guess is this one will be posted many more times over the next few weeks. There is no forum rule against it.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,868 Member
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    so what do we do about trans fat from fatty meat?

    considering that artificial trans fats from partially hydrogenated oils makes up the bulk of trans fat intake and pretty much everyone with a brain knows that it's some nasty ****, I have no problem with removing partially hydrogenated oils from the food supply. Naturally occurring trans fats from meat and dairy are minuscule in comparison.

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