Page 2 of 2 (Page
1, References)
By Mary Enig and Sally Fallon
That did not prevent the American Heart
Association calling for "modified and ordinary foods"
useful for the purpose of facilitating dietary changes to
newfangled oils away from traditional fats. These foods, said
the AHA literature, should be made available to the consumer,
"...reasonably priced and easily identified by appropriate
labeling. Any existing legal and regulatory barriers to the
marketing of such foods should be removed."
The man who made it possible
to remove any "existing legal and regulatory barriers"
was Peter Barton Hutt, a food lawyer for the prestigious Washington,
DC, law firm of Covington and Burling. Hutt once stated: "Food
law is the most wonderful field of law that you can possibly
enter." After representing the edible oil industry, he
temporarily left his law firm to become general counsel for
the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1971.
The regulatory barrier to foods useful
to the purpose of changing American consumption patterns was
the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which stated: "...there
are certain traditional foods that everyone knows, such as
bread, milk and cheese, and that when consumers buy these
foods, they should get the foods that they are expecting...
[and] if a food resembles a standardized food but does not
comply with the standard, that food must be labeled as an
'imitation'."
The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act had
been signed into law partly in response to consumer concerns
about the adulteration of ordinary foodstuffs. Chief among
the products with a tradition of suffering competition from
imitation products were fats and oils.
In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain
reports on a conversation overheard between a New Orleans
cottonseed oil purveyor and a Cincinnati margarine drummer.
New Orleans boasts of selling deodorised cottonseed oil as
olive oil in bottles with European labels.
"We turn out the whole thing - clean
from the word go - in our factory in New Orleans... We are
doing a ripping trade, too." The man from Cincinnati
reports that his factories are turning out oleomargarine by
the thousands of tons, an imitation that "you can't tell
from butter". He gloats at
the thought of market domination.
"You are going to see the day, pretty
soon, when you won't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself
with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, outside
of the biggest cities... And we can sell it so dirt cheap
that the whole country has got to take it ... butter don't
stand any show - there ain't any chance for competition. Butter's
had its day - and from this out, butter goes to the wall.
"There's
more money in oleomargarine than - why, you can't imagine
the business we do."
In the tradition of Mark Twain's riverboat
hucksters, Peter Barton Hutt guided the FDA through the legal
and congressional hoops to the establishment in 1973 of the
FDA "Imitation" policy which attempted to provide
for "advances in food technology" and give "manufacturers
relief from the dilemma of either complying with an outdated
standard or having to label their new products as 'imitation'...
[since] ...such products are not necessarily inferior to the
traditional foods for which they may be substituted".
Hutt considered the word 'imitation' to
be oversimplified and inaccurate - "potentially misleading
to consumers". The new regulations defined 'inferiority'
as any reduction in content of an essential nutrient that
is present at a level of two per cent or more of the US Recommended
Daily Allowance (RDA).
The new 'imitation' policy meant that
imitation sour cream, made with vegetable oil and fillers
like guar gum and carrageenan, need not be labelled 'imitation'
as long as artificial vitamins were added to bring macronutrient
levels up to the same amounts as those in real sour cream.
Coffee creamers, imitation egg mixes,
processed cheeses and imitation whipped cream
no longer required the 'imitation' label, but could
be sold as real and beneficial foods, low in cholesterol and
rich in polyunsaturates.
These new regulations were adopted without
the consent of Congress, continuing the trend instituted under
Nixon in which the White House would use the FDA to promote
certain social agendas through government food policies. They
had the effect of increasing the lobbying clout of special-interest
groups such as the edible oil industry, and short-circuiting
public participation in the regulatory process.
It allowed food processing innovations,
regarded as 'technological improvements' by manufacturers,
to enter the marketplace without the onus of economic fraud
that might be engendered by greater consumer awareness and
congressional supervision.
They ushered in the era of ersatz foodstuffs,
convenient counterfeit products - weary, stale, flat and immensely
profitable.
Congress
did not voice any objection
to this usurpation of its powers, but entered the contest
on the side of the lipid hypothesis. The Senate Select Committee
on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by George McGovern during
the years 1973 to 1977, actively promoted the use of vegetable
oils.
"Dietary Goals for the United States",
published by the committee, cited USDA data on fat consumption
and stated categorically that "the overconsumption of
fat, generally, and saturated fat in particular...have been
related to six of the ten leading causes of death" in
the United States.
The report urged the American populace
to reduce overall fat intake and to substitute polyunsaturates
for saturated fat from animal sources - margarine and corn
oil for butter, lard and tallow.
Opposing testimony included a moving letter
(buried in the voluminous report) by Dr Fred Kummerow of the
University of Illinois, urging a return to traditional whole
foods and warning against the use of soft drinks.
In the early 1970s, Kummerow had shown
that trans fatty acids caused increased rates of heart disease
in pigs. A private endowment allowed him to continue his research,
but government-funded agencies such as the National Institutes
of Health refused to give him further grants.
One study that was known to McGovern Committee
members, but not mentioned in its final report, compared calves
fed saturated fat from tallow and lard with calves fed unsaturated
fat from soybean oil.
The calves fed tallow and lard did indeed
show higher plasma cholesterol
levels than the soybean-oil-fed calves; fat-streaking
was found in their aortas, and atherosclerosis was also enhanced.
But the calves fed soybean oil showed
a decline in calcium and magnesium levels in the blood, possibly
due to inefficient absorption. They utilised vitamins and
minerals inefficiently, showed poor growth and poor bone development,
and had abnormal hearts.
More cholesterol per unit of dry matter
was found in the aorta, liver, muscle, fat and coronary arteries
- a finding which led the investigators to the conclusion
that the lower blood cholesterol levels in the soybean-oil-fed
calves may be the result of cholesterol being transferred
from the blood to other tissues.
The calves in the soybean oil group collapsed
when forced to move around and they were unaware of their
surroundings for short periods. They also had rickets and
diarrhoea.
The McGovern Committee report continued
dietary trends already in progress: the increased use of vegetables
oils, especially in the form of partially hydrogenated margarines
and shortenings.
In 1976, the FDA established the GRAS
(Generally Recognized As Safe) status for hydrogenated soybean
oil.
A report prepared by the Life Sciences
Research Office of the Federation of American Scientists for
Experimental Biology (LSRO-FSAB) concluded: "There is
no evidence in the available information on hydrogenated soybean
oil that demonstrates or suggests reasonable ground to suspect
a hazard to the public when it is used as a direct or indirect
food ingredient at levels that are now current or that might
reasonably be expected in the future."
When Mary Enig, a graduate student at
the University of Maryland, read the McGovern Committee report,
she was puzzled. Enig was familiar with Kummerow's research
and she knew that the consumption of animal fats in America
was not on the increase.
Quite the contrary: the
use of animal fats had been declining steadily since the turn
of the century.
A report in the Journal of American Oil
Chemists - which the McGovern Committee did not use - showed
that animal fat consumption had declined from 104 grams per
person per day in 1909 to 97 grams per day in 1972, while
vegetable fat intake had increased from a mere 21 grams to
almost 60 grams.14
Total per-capita fat consumption had increased
over the period, but this increase was mostly due to an increase
in unsaturated fats from vegetable oils - with 50 per cent
of the increase coming from liquid vegetable oils and about
41 per cent from margarines made from vegetable oils.
Enig noted a number of studies that directly
contradicted the McGovern Committee's conclusions that "there
is...a strong correlation between dietary fat intake and the
incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer" - two of
the most common cancers in America.
Greece, for example, had less than one-fourth
the rate of breast cancer compared to Israel, but the same
dietary fat intake.
Spain had only one-third the breast cancer
mortality of France and Italy, but the total dietary fat intake
was slightly greater.
Puerto Rico, with a high animal fat intake,
had a very low rate of breast and colon cancer.
The Netherlands and Finland both used
approximately 100 grams of animal fat per capita per day,
but breast and colon cancer rates were almost twice in the
Netherlands what they were in Finland. The Netherlands consumed
53 grams of vegetable fat per person compared to 13 grams
in Finland.
A study from Cali, Colombia, found a
fourfold excess risk for colon cancer in the higher economic
classes which used less animal fat than the lower economic
classes.
A study found that Seventh Day Adventist
physicians, who avoid meat (especially red meat), had a significantly
higher rate of colon cancer
than non-Seventh Day Adventist physicians.
Enig analysed the USDA data that the McGovern
Committee had used and concluded that they showed a strong
positive correlation with total fat and vegetable fat and
an essentially strong negative correlation or no correlation
with animal fat to total cancer deaths, breast and colon cancer
mortality and breast and colon cancer incidence - in other
words, use of vegetable oils seemed to predispose to cancer,
and animal fats seemed to protect against cancer.
She noted that the analysts for the committee
had manipulated the data in inappropriate ways in order to
obtain mendacious results.
Enig submitted her findings to the journal
of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
(FASEB), in May 1978, and her article was published in FASEB's
Federation Proceedings15 in July of the same year - an unusually
quick turnaround. The assistant editor, responsible for accepting
the article, died of a heart attack shortly thereafter.
Enig's paper noted that the correlations
pointed a finger at trans fatty acids and called for further
investigation. Only two years earlier, the Life Sciences Research
Office, which is the arm of FASEB that does scientific investigations,
had published the whitewash that ushered partially hydrogenated
soybean oil onto the GRAS list and removed any lingering constraints
against the number-one ingredient in factory-produced food.
Enig's paper sent alarm bells through
the industry. In early 1979 she received a visit from S. F.
Reipma of the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers.
Short, bald and pompous, Reipma was visibly annoyed. He explained
that both his ssociation and the Institute for Shortening
and Edible Oils (ISEO) kept careful watch to prevent articles
like Enig's from appearing in the literature.
Enig's paper should never have been published,
he said. He thought that ISEO was "watching out".
"We left the barn door open," he said, "and
the horse got out."
Reipma also challenged Enig's use of the
USDA data, claiming that it was in error. He knew it was in
error, he said, "because we give it to them".
A few weeks later, Reipma paid a second
visit, this time in the company of Tom Applewhite, an adviser
to the ISEO and representative of Kraft Foods, Ronald Simpson
with Central Soya, and a representative from Lever Brothers.
They carried with them - in fact, waved
in the air in indignation - a two-inch stack of newspaper
articles, including one that appeared in the National Enquirer,
reporting on Enig's Federation Proceedings article. Applewhite's
face flushed red with anger when Enig repeated Reipma's statement
that they had "left the barn door open and the horse
got out" and his admission that Department of Agriculture
food data had been sabotaged
by the margarine lobby.
The other thing Reipma told Enig during
his unguarded visit was that he had called in on the FASEB
offices in an attempt to coerce them into publishing letters
to refute her paper, without allowing Enig to submit any counter-refutation
as was normally customary in scientific journals.
He told Enig that he was "thrown
out of the office" - an admission later confirmed by
one of the FASEB editors. Nevertheless, a series of letters
did follow the July 1978 article.16 On behalf of the ISEO,
Applewhite and Walter Meyer of Procter & Gamble criticised
Enig's use of the data.
Applewhite accused Enig of extrapolating
from two data points, when in fact she had used seven. John
Bailar, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the National Cancer
Institute pointed out that the correlations between vegetable
oil consumption and cancer were not the same as evidence of
causation, and warned against changing current dietary components
in the hope of preventing
cancer in the future - which is, of course, exactly
what the McGovern Committee did.
In reply, Enig and her colleagues noted
that although the National Cancer Institute (NCI) had provided
them with faulty cancer data, this had no bearing on the statistics
relating to trans consumption and did not affect the gist
of their argument - that the correlation between vegetable
fat consumption, especially trans fat consumption, was sufficient
to warrant a more thorough investigation. The problem was
that very little investigation was being done.
University of Maryland researchers recognised
the need for more research in two areas. One concerned the
effects of trans fats on cellular processes once they are
built into the cell membrane.
Studies with rats, including one conducted
by Fred Mattson in 1960, indicated that the trans fatty acids
were built into the cell membrane in proportion to their presence
in the diet, and that the turnover of trans in the cells was
similar to that of other fatty acids. These studies, according
to J. Edward Hunter of the ISEO, were proof that "trans
fatty acids do not pose any hazard to man in a normal diet".
Enig and her associates were not so sure.
Kummerow's research indicated that the trans fats contributed
to heart disease; and Kritchevsky, whose early experiments
with vegetarian rabbits were now seen to be totally irrelevant
to the human model, had found that trans fatty acids raise
cholesterol in humans.17
Enig's own research, published in her
1984 doctoral dissertation, indicated that trans fats interfered
with enzyme systems that neutralised carcinogens and increased
enzymes that potentiated carcinogens.18
Continued next issue...
About
the Authors:
Mary G. Enig, PhD, is an expert
of international renown in the field of lipid biochemistry.She
has headed a number of studies, in America and Israel, on
the content and effects of trans fatty acids, and has successfully
challenged government assertions that dietary animal fat causes
cancer and heart disease. Recent scientific and media attention
on the possible adverse health effects of trans fatty acids
has brought increased attention to her work.
She is a licensed nutritionist, certified
by the Certification Board for Nutrition Specialists, a qualified
expert witness, a nutrition consultant to individuals, industry,
and state and federal governments, a contributing editor to
a number of scientific publications, a Fellow of the American
College of Nutrition, and President of the Maryland Nutritionists
Association.
She is the author of over 60 technical
papers and presentations, as well as a popular lecturer. Dr
Enig is currently working on the exploratory development of
an adjunct therapy for AIDS using complete medium-chain saturated
fatty acids from whole foods.
She is the mother of three healthy children
brought up on whole foods including butter, cream, eggs and
meat.
Sally Fallon is the author of
Nourishing
Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct
Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats (with Pat Connolly, Executive
Director of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, and
Mary G. Enig, PhD), as well as of numerous articles on the
subject of diet and health.
She is a founder of the Weston A. Price
Foundation.
She is the mother of four healthy children
raised on whole foods including butter, cream, eggs and meat.
Her publications may by obtained by contacting
the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation in San Diego, California,
USA, on (619) 574 7763.
Nexus
Magazine January 1999 Volume 6 #1
