Harmful yet widely used consumer products; and
Responsible for severe health problems in both users and non-users, including cancer, lung disease, and heart disease, which often lead to death.
FDA’s traditional “safe and effective” standard for evaluating medical products does not apply to tobacco. Instead, FDA regulates tobacco products based on a public health standard intended to reduce the toll that tobacco use causes. To legally market a new tobacco product in the United States, a manufacturer must receive a written order from FDA permitting the marketing of the new tobacco product under one of three pathways. These three pathways are as follows:
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they go on to explain how they won’t approve anything that isn’t proven to be safer or at least no more unsafe than the already existing tobacco products. This is not anything like the way they handle foods and food additives. It’s not in their power to ban tobacco entirely, although they do prohibit the introduction of even worse for you forms of tobacco; it *is *in their power to ban harmful food additives.
But I’m not really hung up on the tobacco/food thing. You generally can’t add harmful chemicals to food without good reason.
There are some weird situations though. Absinthe was banned because of the thujone, presumably. I think this was pre-FDA though, so I’m not sure how it is or was regulated. But anyway, sage oil is like half thujone. Is sage too naughty for our foods? Nope.
To be honest, I’m not sure myself. I think because they only half regulate it - they can’t get rid of it, but they’re doing everything they can to get as close to rid of it as they can.
Mostly, they were Freudian slip quotes, I guess. I don’t actually recall typing them intentionally.
Then you seem to have misunderstood my intent. I wasn’t criticizing the FDA in specific. I know that they don’t have the power to ban tobacco. I was saying that it’s crazy that the US government in general clearly has the political will to ban unhealthy substances (whether via the FDA, or the EPA, or the DEA, or other agencies), yet somehow, the most obvious example of that is not banned. I certainly wasn’t implying that “if X can’t be banned, we shouldn’t ban Y.” I’m merely commenting that it’s crazy that something that has been known to have deadly consequences since before the term “trans fats” was ever even coined remains legal even as said fats are getting banned.
It’s kind of like a criminal sitting in jail for 50 years while watching others (who weren’t yet born when he was convicted of his crime) being executed, for crimes which are essentially similar in nature.
This move to all-but-ban partially hydrogenated oils terrifies me.
You know why?
Because JIFFY POP is still made with partially hydrogenated soybean oil!
Unlike the margarine industry, which has successfully switched over to palm oil and fully hydrogenated oils, Jiffy Pop has been unable to reformulate their product to eliminate partially hydrogenated oils. They probably can’t, because the contents of that little aluminum disc have to remain stable at room temperature for months on end.
Thanks to the advent of microwave popcorn, Jiffy Pop is not nearly as popular now as it used to be. The company probably doesn’t have the wherewithal to research a new formula that omits partially hydrogenated soybean oil but still remains shelf-stable and keeps the same familiar flavor. Which means that when this ban goes into effect, it is quite likely that Jiffy Pop will disappear from store shelves altogether.
I’m going to stock up on Jiffy Pop now, while there’s still time!
They can always go back to using saturated fats, which btw, aren’t nearly as bad for as once believed. And it’s not just PHOs that will be banned but any hydrogenated oil since you can’t avoid producing trans-fats in the process, at least not at present AFAIK.
I don’t see why Jiffy Pop can’t use whatever they use in microwave pop corn. It will just have a somewhat short shelf life is all. I’d love to know just how much shorter but I haven’t seen any hard figures yet, not that I’ve actually looked either. I have to believe that with the right additives, it shouldn’t be dramatic but it would be interesting to find out for sure.
I just looked at some Cheez-It snacks I bought a couple weeks ago and they have an expiration date of mid march, 2014 and I have no idea how long they’d already been in the store. Those don’t list any hydrogenated oils. It lists soybean and palm oil with TBHQ so you have to figure the shelf life should be a minimum of 4-5 months.
The Federal Register notice calls for ONLY partially hydrogenated oils to lose their classification as Generally Recognized As Safe. Fully hydrogenated oils will not be affected by this decision.
And the safety of TBHQ is already being called into question, of course, with all sorts of non-sequitors about how it’s also used in varnish and shoe polish.
edit: but, and I might be wrong about this too, I think fully hydrogenated oil would be the same thing as saturated fat, wouldn’t it? IOW, from a health point of view, I don’t know you would necessarily be any better off using fully hydrogenated oils over regular saturated fat.
Yes, fully hydrogenated = saturated. They may not be exactly the same chemicals, as they could have different chain lengths. The “trans” part of trans fats is an unsaturation, it’s just trans instead of cis.
Now now, Crisco® has changed its formulation in the last decade or so. It now consists primarily of a mixture of liquid soybean oil and fully hydrogenated palm oil. It contains a little bit of partially hydrogenated oil, but the level is low enough to keep its trans fat content below 0.5 grams per serving.
I don’t think taking partially hydrogenated oils off the GRAS list will prevent them from being used in food entirely. They will merely be reclassified as a “food additive”, which means food manufacturers won’t be able to add them to food casually like they do now. The manufacturers will have to obtain some kind of FDA permission first. I don’t know how difficult or expensive this permission is.
