FDA Orders Food Manufacturers To Stop Using Trans Fats By 2018
By Isaac Fletcher, contributing writer, Food Online
After a long effort to better control trans fats in the U.S. food supply, the FDA has announced that the food industry must eliminate them entirely in order to provide safer foods for consumers.
The FDA has announced that food manufacturers will have three years to eliminate all trans fats from products. Since an initial announcement in 2013 that laid out plans to take steps toward eliminating trans fat, the FDA has addressed thousands of public comments. On June 16, the agency reached its decision to remove trans fats altogether by 2018. The FDA estimates that removing trans fats from the food supply will prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease every year. Although putting the action into effect will cost roughly $6 billion, the ruling will save approximately $140 billion in health care and other costs over the course of 20 years.
Well-known to be a major contributor to heart disease, the presence of trans fats has already been significantly reduced in many foods. However, despite growing awareness of its dangers, trans fats are still present in many products. Although the food industry is pleased to have a three-year window to carry out the removal, it plans to seek permission to continue using small amounts of trans fats in specific products, as their complete removal poses some major challenges.
The FDA ruling states that partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), the source of trans fats, are no longer considered generally recognized as safe (GRAS). If food producers wish to continue using PHOs, they will need to prove that the oils are safe for consumption. With the Institute of Medicine concluding that there is no safe level of PHO consumption, proving their safety will be a substantial challenge.
PHOs have been used in many food processing applications due to the fact that they are not only cheaper than saturated animal fats, such as butter, but they were once believed to be healthier as well. The popularity of these oils grew through their use in fried and baked goods, but research eventually revealed that they raised levels of bad cholesterol while lowering levels of good cholesterol.
Better awareness about the dangers of PHOs led the FDA to requiring companies to list trans fat content on nutrition labels. This requirement alone incentivized many companies to stop using them. According to FDA estimates, the consumption of trans fats dropped by 78 percent between 2003 and 2012, and the agency cites the labeling ruling as a major driver for this dramatic decrease.
Even with this new ruling, trans fats will not be entirely eliminated from the food supply, as they occur naturally in meat and dairy products. Trace amounts are also used in some oils during the manufacturing process.