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