It is extraordinary that trans fats haven’t been banned. According to the overwhelming weight of medical research, they are very bad for the heart, contribute to the UK’s very high levels of heart disease and boost the UK’s excess coronary deaths every year. The President of the UK Faculty of Public Health, Prof. Alan Maryon-Davis, has today asserted that trans fats are much more damaging than saturated fats. Every year more than 140,000 Britons suffer a heart attack from which over half die. So why are trans fats still used? They are vegetable oils that have been chemically altered in order to bulk up foods – notably cakes, pies, pastries, chips and fast foods – and extend their shelf life. In other words these manufactured ingredients can and do kill people, but are still used by the food industry because it significantly increases their sales and profits – yet another glaring example of how governments side with the big corporations rather than the health of their citizens. To tobacco, asbestos, thalidomide must now be added trans fats.

The dangers are clear, but simply brushed aside. The food industry’s defence is that the average intake is below officially designated safe levels (though how independently were those ‘safe levels’ set?), but low-income families who eat more processed and and fried foods are undoubtedly at risk of severe heart conditions. The Food Standards Agency (another quango that is too close to the industry it is supposed to regulate) again repeats the canard of average consumption in defence of its own refusal to intervene, when the medical profession insists that there is no known safe level of consumption, just the same as with cigarettes. So why doesn’t government on precautionary grounds to protect the health of all ban trans fats? Because government too is far too close to the food industry, as its neoliberal market philosophy makes it highly susceptible to lobbying by big industry.
I have put down 2 Parliamentary Questions to the Health Minister:
1 IKn the light of the latest evidence from the UK Public Faculty of Public Health, the WHO, the Royal College of General Practitioners, and the National Heart Forum about the coronary effects of artificial trans fats, will he now ban them?
2 Will he make it a criminal offence for the food industry to manufacture and sell artificial food products which are known to be seriously harmful to health?

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