Trans fat: the poisonous chemical found in packaged foods
Spotting harmful dietary fats from labels
Fast food and ready-to-eat meals are becoming more and more popular among Asian city dwellers as a result of the region’s growing urbanization and fast-paced lifestyle. However, these prepackaged foods and ‘comfort foods’ may be full of trans fats – the dietary fats which are bad for one’s health.
The American Heart Association claims that eating trans fats increases your risk of developing heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes because they lower your good (HDL) cholesterol levels and raise your bad (LDL) cholesterol levels.
Trans fats are present in a wide variety of foods, such as fried foods like doughnuts , baked goods, and other packaged foods, as well as certain ingredients like margarines, shortening and other fatty substances. So, whenever you bite into your favorite snack, consider whether you may be consuming trans fats.
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To find out how many trans fats are in packaged food, consult the Nutrition Facts label. When a product is advertised as having no trans fats, it may actually mean that it only contains less than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving. The food’s ingredient list refers to transfats as “partially hydrogenated oils.”
Transfats are putting billions of people worldwide at risk of heart disease
According to a recent WHO report, Countdown to 2023 WHO Report on global trans fat elimination 2022, five billion people worldwide are already unprotected from harmful trans fats, increasing their risk of developing heart disease and dying from it.
Population coverage of best-practice policies has increased nearly six-fold since WHO first called for the global elimination of industrially produced trans fat in 2018 with an elimination target set for 2023. At this point, 43 nations have put best-practice regulations against trans fat in food into place, protecting 2.8 billion people worldwide.
However, despite significant progress, this still exposes five billion people to the devasting health effects of trans fat, making the global goal for its complete eradication in 2023 currently unachievable.
Packaging, baked goods, cooking oils, and spreads frequently contain industrially produced trans fat, also known as industrially produced trans-fatty acids. Up to nearly half million early deaths from coronary heart disease occur worldwide each year as a result of trans fat consumption.
There is currently no best-practice policy in place in 9 of the 16 nations with the highest estimated percentage of coronary heart disease deaths attributed to trans fat consumption. Australia, Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and South Korea are among them, according to WHO.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO. claimed that transfat has no known benefits and significant health risks, which result in significant costs for healthcare systems. Contrarily, eliminating trans fat is affordable and has significant positive health effects. Simply put, trans fat is a poisonous chemical that causes death and has no place in food. It’s time to permanently get rid of it.
Best practices to eliminate trans fat
Policies for the elimination of trans fats restrict the use of industrially produced trans fat in all contexts and follow certain standards advised by the WHO: a mandatory national limit of 2 grams of industrially produced trans fat per 100 grams of total fat in all foods, and a mandatory national ban on the production or use of partially hydrogenated oils as an ingredient in all foods.
While higher-income nations like those in the Americas and Europe have implemented the majority of trans fat elimination policies, middle-income nations like Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Paraguay, the Philippines, and Ukraine are increasingly doing the same.
In 2023, best-practice policies are also being considered in Sri Lanka, Mexico, and Nigeria. No low-income nation has yet to adopt a best-practice policy to ban trans fat.
WHO suggests that nations concentrate on these four areas in 2023: implementing best-practice policies, monitoring and surveillance, healthy oil replacements, and advocacy. To assist nations in moving forward quickly in these areas, WHO guidance has been developed. The organisation supports the International Food and Beverage Alliance’s (IFBA) pledge to remove industrially produced trans fat from its products. The biggest food producers in the world have been urged to stop using industrially produced trans fats in their products.
SOURCES:
https://www.who.int/news/item/23-01-2023-five-billion-people-unprotected-from-trans-fat-leading-to-heart-disease
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/fats/trans-fat
Category: Health alert
