As you've probably heard, the FDA ruled last week to ban trans-fats and phase them out of all food products over the next three years. This news has been widely covered, both heralded for its health implications and critiqued for being too long in coming. Yet either way, it is not a panacea, as Stanford Medicine professor Christopher Gardner, PhD, explained when he shared his opinion with me over the weekend:
The true impact of the FDA ban on trans-fats will not be known until we find out what substitutes the food industry finds, and what that does to the sale of junk food and the health of Americans in response to the switch. It could be beneficial. But it isn’t as if trans-fats will be gone and everyone will eat an extra two servings of vegetables in their place.
Gardner, who has spent the past 20 years researching the health benefits of various nutrition components, pointed out that "a lot of good people and excellent scientists worked on this for a long time" and "it took a great deal of effort to assemble the science to demonstrate that this is something so harmful in the American diet that it should be removed with an FDA ban." He also offered more specifics on what food companies might do following the ban:
The companies making those products are unlikely to remove those junk food products entirely from the shelves of grocery stores across America. Instead, it is most likely that they will look for an alternate form of fat that will serve as closely as possible the same role that trans-fats served. Trans-fats act like saturated fats in terms of being solid rather than liquid at room temperature. This can help the icing on a cupcake stay solid, and it can give a “mouth feel” of solid fat that people like to taste in their food. The goal of the food industry will be to replace the trans-fat with another fat that is solid at room temperature, which likely means the replacement could very well be as bad as the trans fats themselves.
For example, palm oil or esterified stearic acid are likely to be options. For the palm oil, this will mean destruction of rain forests and biological diversity. For esterified stearic acid, this will mean another reason to grow more monocultures of soybeans from which to extract the oil. Both of these will likely have a negative environmental impact. There are likely other choices to consider.
After all this, will those junk foods now be health foods? Absolutely not. They might be slightly healthier junk foods, but still junk foods.
