An American consumer advocacy group has petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prohibit the use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil as a food ingredient.
The nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest filed a 37-page petition with the government regulator, claiming the ban could save 11,000-30,000 lives a year.
By the FDA’s own estimates, 80 percent of the artery-clogging trans fats in American diets comes from vegetable oil treated with hydrogen gas to extend the product’s shelf life and give it stability when used for frying.
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“Food processing companies should worry less about the shelf life of their products and more about the shelf life of their customers,” said Michael Jacobson, the centre’s executive director.
“Getting rid of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is probably the single easiest, fastest, cheapest way to save tens of thousands of lives each year.”
In addition to its petition, the group is encouraging the one million subscribers to its Nutrition Action Healthletter to join a grassroots campaign encouraging food manufacturers to use healthier oils.
Some of the alternatives suggested in the FDA petition include high-oleic canola, corn, soy, sunflower and safflower oils that are relatively low in the linoleic and linolenic fatty acids that promote rancidity and reduce fry life.
On the surface the centre’s campaign sounds like a perfect fit with the Canola Council of Canada’s promotional blitz under way south of the border.
“It’s definitely not a bad thing that this issue is receiving profile in the United States,” said council president Barb Isman.
But an outright prohibition on partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is not something the council wants.
“The size of that market is just enormous. If you were to make an immediate ban, it would create huge dislocation in the market and we couldn’t supply it anyway.”
It could also force food processors to reach for the cheapest and most easily available alternative like palm oil, which is high in saturated fats.
“That’s switching one not-so-positive fat profile for another,” said Isman.
The council is content to wait for a more natural shift away from partially hydrogenated oils into healthier alternatives.
Rules requiring food processors to disclose trans fat content on labels will be implemented in the U.S. in 2006. Similar labelling laws take effect in Canada on Dec. 12, 2005, for big manufacturers and Dec. 12, 2007, for small manufacturers.
Isman is confident that will prompt the food processing and restaurant industries to gradually switch to high oleic oils.
“I think the companies will get there in advance of labelling day.”
She is glad the canola industry has a few years to gear up production of its high oleic lines. Right now, almost all the Canadian canola oil sold in the U.S. is liquid oil used for salad dressings.
Canadian farmers are projected to seed about one million acres of high oleic varieties this year, up from 600,000 acres in 2003. But it remains a small portion of the 12.6 million acre crop.
“Time is actually a bit of a friend to us at the moment,” said Isman.
