> The U.S. market size for palm oil is 2.6 billion pounds (1.2 billion kilograms) annually, he said. He expects that to increase by half a billion pounds a year once trans fats are eliminated.
The deforestation has to stop, I've traveled in Indonesia both personally and professionally and have seen the devastation that illegal (but government tolerated) deforestation causes.
At the same time abandoning palm oil is both extremely impractical and causes numerous other sustainability problems. Palm oil has incredibly high yields per hectare when compared with other oil crops, which is important to consider when discussing it's 'sustainability'. It's yeilds are something like 3-5 tons per hectare per year, while soy/sunflower/others are less than 1 ton/ha/yr. Not to mention the human impact, it's a cash crop for many small holders who's livelihood depends on it. For these reasons, even very vocal environmental organizations like GreenPeace stop short of calling for boycotts... the focus needs to be on producing it sustainably.
Consumers need to demand that the palm oil in their products is sustainably produced e.g. via the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) or otherwise. Unfortunately even knowing if palm oil is in your product or not has been difficult, and even brands who use sustainably produced palm oil are hesitant to draw attention to the the oil in their products.
I've worked closely with this program on technical projects, and while it certainly has a number of flaws, the accountably is much higher than for conventional palm oil. I'm really hopeful that research into other methods (Algae oil production) will be more economical/efficient/sustainable, but at the moment it's still theoretical. :(
To select just one of their arguments--that palm oil's production results in deforestation/climate change--one can make the same sort of argument about nearly any industry. E.g. if solar power companies of the future were to deforest mass swaths of land to make way for large solar farms, then one might argue that the solar industry contributes to climate change. It's a poor argument because the production of solar energy in no way necessitates deforestation; similarly palm oil production does not necessitate deforestation, animal cruelty, and non-sustainable production methods.
I'm not arguing for or against palm oil. I know virtually nothing about palm oil; I'm simply criticizing the source.
Trans fat is really bad news. It is a preservative that is hugely detrimental to health. Palm oil is separate and deforestation is a separate problem from that.
Keeping something that hurts people legal because another country is destroying forests is not a workable plan. Indonesia needs to be dealt with separate from the issue of trans fats.
> “I don’t know how many lives will be saved, but probably in the thousands per year when all the companies are in compliance,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Ironic since CSPI is one of the major reasons that we are using trans-fats today.
One of them? From what I've read and documentaries watched, they are the major reason. Typically example of people going out of their way to order people how to live their lives for the "better" but ends up being worse. Plus it seems they are being revisionist about trying to act as if their pro trans-fat stance never happened.
Thank goodness. This will finally put an end to companies including trans fat in their products but labeling 0 grams of trans fat due to serving size and other stupid tricks. I think consumers as a whole can get over pie crust not feeling the same for a little bit, as well as a slightly different texture for frosting.
This already happened several years ago. There was about a year where all snack foods were utterly disgusting - Cheetos were like fried glass, potato chips were limp and off tasting, Oreo cookies were brittle and the filling tasted like chemicals.
They slowly figured out replacements for the trans fats that improved the quality. We'll never know quite what they are because of trade secrets. But it's probably far less natural than hydrogenated oils.
Oreo cookies, by the way, never recovered. They are terrible.
This story is a great reminder that there's a lot of potential for studying Regulations.gov API and writing an interface (and heuristic) for surfacing interesting rules and regulations...the trans-fat rule has been up for comment for long while now:
Maybe I'm in the minority of people who hadn't heard that this transfat regulation was soon to be implemented (as a former New Yorker, it caught me by surprise)...but there are probably many upcoming rules that are worth knowing about before they get published.
> “I don’t know how many lives will be saved, but probably in the thousands per year when all the companies are in compliance,”
I doubt it. People are going to continue to eat way to much of things they shouldn't, or too much of things that should be only eaten in moderation. It's not like Trans-Fats are the only thing people are eating too much of that is killing them.
Very few things in food are categorically bad for you. Even stuff like fat & sodium, which people generally think of as "not good for you" are required for your body. If you tried to make a list of foods that actively harm you or that cannot be made a part of a healthy diet then your list would be very small.
Transfats are one of the few things that the above does not apply to. They are actively bad for you and there are no known redeeming qualities.
Although trans fats are edible, consumption of trans fats has shown to increase the risk of coronary heart diseasein part by raising levels of the lipoprotein LDL (so-called "bad cholesterol"), lowering levels of the lipoprotein HDL ("good cholesterol"), increasing triglycerides in the bloodstream and promoting systemic inflammation.
Alcohol-Related Deaths:
Nearly 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making it the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
EDIT:
I'm not advocating that alcohol be illegal. I couldn't care less to be honest.
I guess my comment was more of a question of how can you ban substance "A" because "Its bad for you"; but not ban substance "B" which kills 90k people in the U.S. annually? It just seems cherry picked is all. If the gov't is going to ban bad things, how does substance "B" get a pass?
Because substance A is taken willingly and knowingly and has no realistic substitute. Substance B is slipped to consumers unknowingly in many cases and there are plenty of cheap healthy substitutes.
Because alcohol is deeply socially ingrained with no direct substitute for most users, which makes banking it ineffective and likely to produce more harm than good. We kind of tried that already. Trans fats aren't like alcohol in that way.
Those standards are only one factor in the decision. Americans need/want alcohol badly enough that they wouldn't tolerate it being illegal. People can start consuming one type of oil vs. another without even knowing the difference.
You can never look at one similar aspect of two very different things and make any conclusion about inconsistency or hypocrisy. It's an incredibly oversimplified attitude.
Don't get me started. people seem to always look at me strangely when I tell them I don't drink. People like it and it is important to them so anything said against alcohol is RADICAL. People love being emotionally numbed and I guess people have a right to depress their emotions with drinking or whatever legal/prescribed drugs they want. There is very little said in terms of the emotional/relationship cost of their use.
Too widely used with too specific qualities that aren't closely enough replaceable. There are replacements for transfat that don't dramatically alter the taste or texture, but you can't drink a soda and get drunk.
It's politically a more difficult maneuver; we know because we tried it in the 20s
The gov just cherry picks/jumps on the bandwagon for certain things and calls that progress, while at the same time subsidizing industries promoting bad health and the obesity epidemic. Real change won't come from authoritarian bans but from a cultural shift and people caring more about their health.
Because we have different levels of risk and standards for what we consider recreation substances vs food? I don't know why that's so far to understand. These things have almost nothing in common from a public policy perspective. Even if we got rid of alcohol then it would be tobacco then guns, neither of which are food also.
Because the NFL would go broke. Everyone knows it takes at least a 6 pack before one can understand why a 1 hour game has less than 15 minutes of actual play. Without alcohol to dull the senses, people would simply stop watching it.
> “I don’t know how many lives will be saved, but probably in the thousands per year when all the companies are in compliance,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
"Saved" in this context means what, living 3 months longer because your heart disease is slightly milder than it would otherwise have been?
That's nice, but I think will be ineffectual in practice. As soon as you start cooking with any unsaturated fats, a portion will isomerize to trans fats. I doubt major food manufacturers are using only trans-fat sources in today's climate of health conscious (or hypervigilant) practices.
> "The results indicate that heating canola, corn, and premium and generic olive oil to their smoke point for at least 15 minutes does not quantifiably increase their respective concentration of trans fatty acids."
The food police were wrong and killed a lot of people with trans fats. Can we have our lard back now? Oreo cookies taste like crap with whatever they've replaced the trans fats with.
I still don't quite get it; couldn't they have just mandated the usage/inclusion of trans-fat in product, and let the consumers avoid it? By the same standards, we're still letting people smoke and drink.
Maybe I'll finally be able to find snack cakes and biscuits without partially hydrogenated oil. That stuff is everywhere, even when the label proudly claims '0 trans fat!'. Such a crock.
But vegetable shortening necessarily contains large amounts of trans fat. Does this mean that currently vegetarian foodstuffs will switch back to lard?
This issue is the most important health and safety issue in the country right now. Add up all of the deaths due to obesity-related diseases and it's an obvious low-hanging fruit for improvement. For all the yellow-jacket journalism surrounding cars or drugs or strangers or vaccines or guns, they are all drops in the bucket compared to heart disease.
But that said, I don't think the FDA or CDC are doing anything functionally significant towards improving the issue. There is a greater underlying question that still needs to be answered: why has the problem continued to get worse, despite ALL efforts otherwise?
There is a gun against the head of 2/3rds of Americans and nobody is asking how it got there and why it's still there. I'm afraid it's because we keep arguing about the shape and color of the bullets and how you should really be better at dodging bullets of you want to stay alive.
It's strange that they're putting these measures in place when sugar is significantly more damaging to people. High fructose corn syrup would have been a much better target.
I live in france and apparently there is no law to force manufacturers to indicate those. I often see "hydrogenated oil", but I don't know if it's possible to get away with those tricks mentioned in the article.
[+] [-] cowpig|10 years ago|reply
This is really, really bad news.
http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/Whats_the_issue.php
[+] [-] furyg3|10 years ago|reply
At the same time abandoning palm oil is both extremely impractical and causes numerous other sustainability problems. Palm oil has incredibly high yields per hectare when compared with other oil crops, which is important to consider when discussing it's 'sustainability'. It's yeilds are something like 3-5 tons per hectare per year, while soy/sunflower/others are less than 1 ton/ha/yr. Not to mention the human impact, it's a cash crop for many small holders who's livelihood depends on it. For these reasons, even very vocal environmental organizations like GreenPeace stop short of calling for boycotts... the focus needs to be on producing it sustainably.
Consumers need to demand that the palm oil in their products is sustainably produced e.g. via the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) or otherwise. Unfortunately even knowing if palm oil is in your product or not has been difficult, and even brands who use sustainably produced palm oil are hesitant to draw attention to the the oil in their products.
I've worked closely with this program on technical projects, and while it certainly has a number of flaws, the accountably is much higher than for conventional palm oil. I'm really hopeful that research into other methods (Algae oil production) will be more economical/efficient/sustainable, but at the moment it's still theoretical. :(
[+] [-] acaloiar|10 years ago|reply
I'm not arguing for or against palm oil. I know virtually nothing about palm oil; I'm simply criticizing the source.
[+] [-] arbitrage|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bottled_poe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|10 years ago|reply
Keeping something that hurts people legal because another country is destroying forests is not a workable plan. Indonesia needs to be dealt with separate from the issue of trans fats.
[+] [-] LordKano|10 years ago|reply
The people leading the charge on this are the primary reason why we went to trans fats in the first place!
[+] [-] azdle|10 years ago|reply
Ironic since CSPI is one of the major reasons that we are using trans-fats today.
[+] [-] talmand|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vraxx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|10 years ago|reply
They slowly figured out replacements for the trans fats that improved the quality. We'll never know quite what they are because of trade secrets. But it's probably far less natural than hydrogenated oils.
Oreo cookies, by the way, never recovered. They are terrible.
[+] [-] venomsnake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|10 years ago|reply
http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=FDA-2013-N-1317
Maybe I'm in the minority of people who hadn't heard that this transfat regulation was soon to be implemented (as a former New Yorker, it caught me by surprise)...but there are probably many upcoming rules that are worth knowing about before they get published.
[+] [-] tswartz|10 years ago|reply
https://news.vice.com/article/indonesia-is-killing-the-plane...
[+] [-] mhurron|10 years ago|reply
I doubt it. People are going to continue to eat way to much of things they shouldn't, or too much of things that should be only eaten in moderation. It's not like Trans-Fats are the only thing people are eating too much of that is killing them.
[+] [-] mason55|10 years ago|reply
Transfats are one of the few things that the above does not apply to. They are actively bad for you and there are no known redeeming qualities.
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
[http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-cho...]
[+] [-] tomjen3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwally|10 years ago|reply
Alcohol-Related Deaths: Nearly 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making it the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
-http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-con...
EDIT: I'm not advocating that alcohol be illegal. I couldn't care less to be honest.
I guess my comment was more of a question of how can you ban substance "A" because "Its bad for you"; but not ban substance "B" which kills 90k people in the U.S. annually? It just seems cherry picked is all. If the gov't is going to ban bad things, how does substance "B" get a pass?
[+] [-] MacsHeadroom|10 years ago|reply
Alcohol and Transfats are apples and oranges.
[+] [-] lbotos|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nck4222|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdulli|10 years ago|reply
You can never look at one similar aspect of two very different things and make any conclusion about inconsistency or hypocrisy. It's an incredibly oversimplified attitude.
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
1 in 10 US Deaths are directly related to Alcohol Use [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/alcohol-responsible-1-10...]
World Wide: In the age group 20 – 39 years approximately 25 % of the total deaths are alcohol-attributable. [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs349/en/]
[+] [-] Lambdanaut|10 years ago|reply
It's politically a more difficult maneuver; we know because we tried it in the 20s
[+] [-] ahallock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alpha1234|10 years ago|reply
[1]http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Healing-Suppression-Manipulat...
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_ancient|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] johnward|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2color|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|10 years ago|reply
"Saved" in this context means what, living 3 months longer because your heart disease is slightly milder than it would otherwise have been?
[+] [-] leonardicus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nate_meurer|10 years ago|reply
http://blogs.longwood.edu/incite/2012/01/30/heat-induced-cis...
From the above paper:
> "The results indicate that heating canola, corn, and premium and generic olive oil to their smoke point for at least 15 minutes does not quantifiably increase their respective concentration of trans fatty acids."
[+] [-] cko|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niuzeta|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheshire137|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thescriptkiddie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasenj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|10 years ago|reply
But that said, I don't think the FDA or CDC are doing anything functionally significant towards improving the issue. There is a greater underlying question that still needs to be answered: why has the problem continued to get worse, despite ALL efforts otherwise?
There is a gun against the head of 2/3rds of Americans and nobody is asking how it got there and why it's still there. I'm afraid it's because we keep arguing about the shape and color of the bullets and how you should really be better at dodging bullets of you want to stay alive.
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kdamken|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|10 years ago|reply
Got coronary disease in my family...