Politics & Government

Put Down the Pizza: Does Your Favorite Food Have Trans Fat?

The Food and Drug Administration wants to remove artificially manufactured fats from ingredients' lists. Trans fats are found in some baked goods, frozen pizza and coffee creamers.

They're in everything from doughnuts to frozen pizza, coffee creamer to microwave popcorn. And the federal government says these artificial ingredients are not good for you.

So before you snack, check which foods might have trans fats in them, say experts.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is taking steps to ban trans fat in the country’s food supply. A proposed regulation issued Thursday would remove artificially manufactured fats from its list of ingredients, “generally recognized as safe.”

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The substance makes commercial pie crusts flaky and frosting easy to spread, says the Newark Star-Ledger. However, trans fat also clogs the arteries by increasing the amount of LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, in the blood.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the move could prevent 20,000 heart attacks a year and 7,000 deaths, reports the Huffington Post.

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FDA officials found that even though the agency’s 2006 requirement of labeling the amount of trans fat on Nutritional Facts because of public health concerns, there are still many processed foods made with partially hydrogenated oils - the biggest dietary source of trans fat in processed foods.

Baked goods and frozen foods are some of the popular processed foods that contain PHOs, which have been widely used as ingredients since the 1950s to increase shelf-life or add flavor stability to foods, according to the FDA’s website.

According to CNN, the government is placing catch-up to many food manufacturers, which have taken steps to limit or eliminate trans fat from their products. McDonald's, for instance, stopped cooking its french fries in trans fat more than a decade ago.

New York City in 2007 adopted a regulation banning partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and spreads in restaurants.

In a statement released Thursday on its website, the FDA has now tentatively determined PHOs are not “generally recognized as safe” for any use in food based on current research that shows the health risks associated with consuming trans fat. They are, therefore, food additives. And while the FDA has not listed the most commonly used PHOs, officials say they have been used for years based on industry self-determinations that the use of them is generally recognized as safe.

If finalized, food manufacturers wouldn’t be able to sell PHOs either directly or as ingredients for other food products without prior FDA approval for use as a food additive.


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