What was the secret of the public health community’s victory when previous efforts to control the food industry failed?
There are three broad ways to mediate the degradation of risky choices: inform people (such as using a label), displace people (for example, by offering financial incentives), or intervene directly to make the activity less dangerous. Which do you think prevented more car deaths: mandating driver education, labeling cars for crash risk, or eliminating the human factor entirely by ensuring airbags are installed? There are public food campaigns that educate the public, from “sugar park” ads on public transportation that inform consumers of the amount of sugar in soft drinks to “Hot Dogs Cause Butt Cancer” billboards that educate about the link between processed meat and skin cancer, as shown here and at 0:52 in my video. How We Won the Battle to Ban Trans Fat.
But is there a way to make products nutritionally safe in the first place?
The ban on trans fats provides a useful lesson. In 1993, the Harvard Nurses’ Study found that a high intake of trans fats could increase the risk of heart disease by 50%. This is where the trans fat story started in Denmark, and ended there ten years later with the ban on more trans fats in 2003. It took another 10 years, however, before the United States even began to consider a ban. All the while, trans fats were killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, leading to many years of healthy life lost to conditions such as meningitis, cervical cancer, and multiple sclerosis. If so many people are suffering and dying, why did it take so long for the United States to even be able to tell lift up to take action?
One can view the fight over New York City’s oil ban as a microcosm of the national debate. Opposition has come down hard on the food industry, complaining of “government interference,” likening the city to a “nanny district.” Since trans fats are naturally found in meat and milk, the livestock industry echoes the argument of the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils that everything should be eaten in moderation. Critics call proposals like this “the rise of food fascism.” But it was the restaurant and food industry that limited consumer choice by widely contaminating the food supply with these harmful oils.
If “nutritionists” get their wish in banning added fat, another argument went, what’s next? Private corporate interests often conjure up these kinds of “slippery slope” arguments to try to distract from the real fact that people are dying. I mean, what if the government tried to make us eat broccoli?! This actually came from the Supreme Court case regarding Obamacare. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that Congress could start by “mandating everyone to buy vegetables,” fearing what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called “the dreaded broccoli.” At the extreme, Congress can force the American public to eat a plant-based diet, Justice Ginsburg wrote, yet one cannot “provide ‘opportunity for presumption and falsehood’… As one legal scholar put it, “Judges and lawyers live on a slippery slope of mathematics; they must not look down on you.”
New York City has finally won its war on oil, maintaining its status as a public health leader. For example, New York banned lead paint 18 years before federal action, despite decades of indisputable evidence of its harm. Comparing heart rate and heart rate before and after the trans-fat ban was passed in different New York counties, researchers estimated that it effectively reduced the rate of cardiovascular death by about 5%. This set the precedent for nationwide bans in subsequent years. How was the public health community able to prevail when earlier efforts to regulate the food industry failed? If you had asked me about the implications of a national ban on trans-fats, I would have said, “Fat chance.”
In Denmark, as a leading Danish cardiologist put it, “Instead of warning consumers about trans fats and telling them what they are, we have told them they are fats. [the Danes] he just removed them.” But we are Americans! “As they say in North America: ‘You can poison food if you label it correctly.'” If people know the dangers, the argument goes, they should be able to eat whatever they want. But that assumes they’re given all the facts, which isn’t always the case given the food industry’s “organized dishonesty model,” as one health ethics professor put it. Given the speculation of manipulation and exploitation, government intervention seemed necessary, but how would it pass?
First, there was a labeling requirement. Manufacturers should have started adding trans-fat content to the nutrition facts labeling of products. This should have had an impact on consumers, but it may have had a greater impact on producers. Now that they had to reveal the truth, the companies insisted on reformulating their products to find “fat-free” competition.
During the years of mandatory disclosure, more than 5,000 products were introduced showing low or zero fat on their labels. Kentucky Fried Chicken went from being sued for having high levels of trans fat to running an ad campaign where a mom tells a dad in front of the kids that KFC now has zero grams of trans fat, and the dad yells, “Yeah baby! Whoooo!!” then he starts eating fried chicken from a bucket. That was the secret to passing the ban. When the big players in the food industry reformulated their products and boasted about it—when money was not at stake—there was insufficient political will to prevent a ban, and more fuel was pumped out of the arena.
Doctor’s Note
It is important to note that the trans fat ban has not affected the fats found in meat and milk. Look Banning Trans Fats in Processed Foods But Not Animal Fats.
In case you missed it, in the video Do Healthy Fast Food Options Lead to Healthy Choices?I’ve discussed how listing calories on menus doesn’t make people choose healthier options.
stay tuned Highly Processed Junk Foods Examined.
