Posts Tagged ‘trans-fats’

A Baltimore cookie drama, in two acts

Act I: In a widely read Nov. 15 piece in Atlas Obscura, Priya Krishna reports on “the quest to save Baltimore’s Berger Cookie,” a beloved local food institution. “One of the most essential ingredients in the Berger Cookie is trans fats. Trans fats are what make the chocolate super creamy, prevent the fat and the water in the dough from separating (which would yield an overly crumbly cookie), and keep the cookie stable in both very warm and very cold settings.” However, the Obama administration enacted a federal ban on trans fats — for your own good, you know — which goes into effect next year.

Cookie producer Charlie DeBaufre, interviewed by Krishna, “refers to the past year as ‘frustrating and scary,’ as so many of his trans fat-free experiments have been failures. ‘I have spent $10,000 trying to get this worked out. I am not a big business. I don’t have an R&D Department. I have to shut down production for a few hours, still pay people for labor, and then most of the product gets trashed. It’s tough.'” More background in a piece I wrote for Cato last week.

Act II: Then a twist, reported by Sarah Meehan in the Baltimore Sun Nov. 21: the fudge supplier had managed to replace trans fats months ago and didn’t tell Berger’s. While early attempts to reformulate fudge frosting without trans fats had suffered from various quality defects, the new recipe was much improved to the point where neither consumers nor Berger’s had noticed.

So a happy if unexpected ending, at least for this one company, right? But the regulatory downside — you just knew there had to be one — was that in changing its recipe the fudge supplier had added more sugar, which appears to have boosted the calorie count and might have changed other things reported in the Nutrition Facts box as well. Since Berger’s says it didn’t know about the new formula, one inference might be that for a while it has been shipping cookies with a faulty calorie/nutrition count on the package. Hello to class action woes and, if the FDA is in a bad mood, regulatory liability?

Filed under: Baltimore, FDA, food safety, trans-fats, WO writings

Food roundup

Tufts doc who wants to “eliminate” sweetened drinks is senior author on flawed new study on their health effects [Gil Ross, ACSH]
Nick Gillespie interviews celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian (“In Praise of Free Enterprise Food”) and Whole Foods’ John Mackey. “Despite the strength of our local food movement, Kentucky joins Delaware and Rhode Island as the three most restrictive states in the country for cottage food sales.” [LEO Weekly, Louisville]
Fears of toast-spread homebrew in remote communities: “Australia suggests Vegemite sales limit amid ‘alcohol abuse'” [BBC] More: less-sensational followup coverage h/t reader Mark N. in comments;
You really ought to give Iowa-defiance a try: Rand Paul is latest candidate to oppose ethanol mandate [Rare]
“Next Time Government Gives You Dietary Advice, Consider Doing the Opposite” [David Harsanyi] Multiple topping combinations + steep penalties add up to vexation for pizza makers under FDA menu labeling mandate [Savannah Saunders, Economics21; Veronique de Rugy, Reason] “Health Canada Gets it Right, While FDA Goes Further Astray, on ‘Added Sugars’ Labeling” [Glenn Lammi, WLF]
“Federal Judge, Referencing FDA Order on Trans Fat, Permits State-Law Class Action to Proceed” [Glenn Lammi, WLF]
Plaintiff says he bit into someone else’s gold tooth in his biscuit [Nick Farr]

Filed under: Australia, ethanol, FDA, Iowa, obesity, Rand Paul, restaurants, soft drinks, trans-fats

July 22 roundup

Can Uber survive California law? [Brian Doherty on ruling by state administrative law judge over shortcomings in accessibility; Kristian Stout/Truth on the Market on employee classification and compensation class action] The California Labor Commission’s worker-classification ruling has already killed cleaning-services startup Homejoy [Re/Code via @andrewmgrossman] Plus: Uber communicates satirically with its NYC customers in its battle with Mayor Bill de Blasio [Issie Lapowsky, Wired; related, Josh Greenman; and a new study of Los Angeles users finds Uber X twice as fast and half as expensive as taxis (Mark Kleiman)]
Needed: RFRA for the prepared-foods aisle? “The Trans-Fat Ban Deals A Blow To Kosher Keepers” [Bethany Mandel, Federalist] Consumption of trans fats has already dropped by 85 percent, and “government doesn’t always know best” [me, Arizona PBS]
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office might has well have a macro that generates gag orders” [Ken at Popehat on Reason subpoena, earlier here, etc.]
SCOTUS struck down Ohio’s law banning false campaign speech, Massachusetts’s should fall next [Ilya Shapiro and Gabriel Latner, Cato]
Roger Pilon on church, gays, and “simple idea that people are free to associate or not as they wish” [now un-gated, Cato/WSJ; related, Ilya Shapiro/Washington Times] More on EEOC’s ENDA-by-fiat attempt [Kent Hoover/Business Journals, Nicandro Iannacci, National Constitution Center/Yahoo (thanks for quoting in both cases); Laura Maechtlen and Sam Schwartz-Fenwick, Seyfarth Shaw; and a Washington Blade interview with EEOC member Chai Feldblum, who supported the ruling]
More reactions to HUD’s ambitious local-neighborhood-diversity scheme, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” [Hans Bader, Michael Barone, earlier]
“Star Of Viral Catcalling Video Is Reportedly Suing For Compensation” [Emma Whitford, Gothamist]

Filed under: Bill de Blasio, California, housing discrimination, religious liberty, sexual orientation, taxis and ridesharing, trans-fats, wage and hour suits

July 8 roundup

You could see this coming: ACLU says its support for RFRA religious accommodation laws no longer applies in discrimination law context [David Bernstein]
Root causes of violence: California anti-videogame, anti-gun pol Leland Yee cops a racketeering plea after spectacular arms-smuggling sting [Shackford/Reason, plea agreement via Popehat, earlier]
FDA’s trans fat ban will have litigation implications [Glenn Lammi, WLF] And we mentioned the palm-oil angle earlier: “Why Environmentalists Are Afraid of the FDA’s Attack on Trans Fats” [Jason Plautz, National Journal]
An economic liberty decision: “Texas Supreme Court overturns licensing requirements for eyebrow threaders” [Houston Chronicle, Carrie Sheffield/Opportunity Lives, Eugene Volokh, David Bernstein on Don Willett concurrence rebuking Lochner-phobia]
In trial-lawyer-sourced screed against class action reform, reporter David Lazarus seems to imagine bone break cases are currently sued as class actions [L.A. Times]
NYC taxi commission: OK, we don’t actually need to pre-clear every update of ride-sharing app software [Kristian Stout/Truth on the Market, earlier]
And thanks for Overlawyered mention: “Are happier lawyers, cheaper legal fees on the horizon?” [Glenn Reynolds, USA Today]

Filed under: ACLU, discrimination law, NYC, occupational licensure, taxis and ridesharing, Texas, trans-fats

“We should eliminate them from the food supply.”

That’s sugary drinks that Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the (notably activist) public health school at Tufts, is talking about banning. You didn’t really think it was going to stop with trans fats, did you? [Nicholas Bakalar, New York Times]

Filed under: obesity, soft drinks, trans-fats

Trans fat ban: they’ll be back for seconds

“The FDA’s move to make transfats harder to use has broad implications for consumers, businesses and the power of government to deny people meaningful choices.” It won’t be the last ingredient valued by some consumers that “public health” advocates seek to ban or limit, either. I discuss with Caleb Brown in this new Cato podcast. More background here.

Filed under: on TV and radio, trans-fats

Trans fats banned! Now make way for palm and coconut oil, GMOs…

Pushed by a lawsuit, the Food and Drug Administration has followed through and banned the use of trans fats in processed food: producers have three years to phase out the substance. I’ve got a new piece at Cato making a few basic points: the move is sheer paternalism, it’s setting a precedent (against voluntary consumer assumption of even small risks) that activists are eager to roll out against other ingredients like salt and sugar, it’s not popular with the public (this poll finds a plurality, not majority, going along, while this one finds majorities opposed). And voluntary consumer adjustments (trans fat consumption is down by an estimated 85 percent) have already cut Americans’ average daily intake to half of what the American Heart Association recommends.

Then there’s the sadly ironic history of the whole subject: trans fats were avidly promoted at the time by the same sorts of public health activists and government nutritionists who now push for a ban. CNN:

Dr. Steven Nissen, the chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, praised the FDA for its “bold courage” and said it “deserves a lot of credit” for taking this “enormously important” move.

“In many ways, trans fat is a real tragic story for the American diet,” Nissen said. “In the 1950s and ’60s, we mistakenly told Americans that butter and eggs were bad for them and pushed people to margarine, which is basically trans fat. What we’ve learned now is that saturated fat is relatively neutral — it is the trans fat that is really harmful and we had made the dietary situation worse.”

Or as my colleague Scott Lincicome puts it, “Food tyranny didn’t fail. It just needed better managers”

Now make way for the most popular, and still legal, substitutes for trans fats: tropical palm and coconut oils, each with problems of its own. And an even better prospect — the next panic? –is GMO-derived high-oleic soybean oil.

My Cato piece is here. And I made the WSJ’s Notable & Quotable today on this subject, which is always nice.

Filed under: FDA, public health, trans-fats

The petty tyranny of the FDA’s coming trans fat ban

Don’t count on donuts, frozen pizza, coffee creamers, or canned cinnamon rolls to go on tasting the same — and don’t count on the federal government to respect your choices in the matter [Peter Suderman, earlier] And of course it was public health advocates and the federal government who helped push foodmakers into the use of trans fats in the first place. Some choices do remain to you in the realm of food, so say yes to Mark Bittman’s red lentil dal, no to his politics [Julie Kelly and Jeff Stier, Forbes]

Filed under: eat drink and be merry, FDA, Mark Bittman, nanny state, public health, trans-fats

Friday at Cato, Repeal Day celebration: “Prohibition Still Doesn’t Work”

Featuring Walter Olson, Senior Fellow, Center for Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute & Editor, Overlawyered.com (@walterolson); Stacia Cosner, Deputy Director, Students for Sensible Drug Policy (@TheStacia); Michelle Minton, Fellow in Consumer Policy Studies, Competitive Enterprise Institute (@michelleminton); moderated by Kat Murti, Digital Marketing Manager, Cato Institute (@KatMurti).

On December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, supposedly ending our nation’s failed experiment with prohibitionism. Yet, 81 years later, modern-day prohibitionists continue to deny the laws of supply and demand, attempting to control what individuals can choose to put into their own bodies.

Please join the Cato Institute for a celebration of the 81st anniversary of the repeal of alcohol prohibition. Panelists will discuss modern prohibitions—from the Drug War to blue laws; tobacco regulation to transfats—drawing connections with their earlier antecedent.

Alcoholic beverages and other commonly restricted refreshments (bring on the trans fats!) will be served following the discussion.

#CatoDigital (formerly #NewMediaLunch) is a regular event series at the Cato Institute highlighting the intersection of tech, social media, and the ideas of liberty.

This event will be live-streamed and questions may be submitted via Twitter using #CatoDigital.

If you can’t make it to the Cato Institute, watch this event live online at www.cato.org/live and follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute.

Filed under: alcohol, Cato Institute, live in person, nanny state, tobacco, trans-fats

Food roundup

Obama pick for USDA nutrition chief advances food-as-social-justice theme [Politico, Free Beacon and more, Jeff Stier/Des Moines Register]
Hawaii GMO battle is one the whole nation should watch [Mark Strauss, io9]
“Overprotective Government, Overweight Kids?” [Lenore Skenazy]
“Cherry wars: The crazy economics of Michigan’s favorite pitted fruit” [Bridge Magazine]
“FDA’s Artificial Trans Fat ‘Ban’: A Dangerous Step to Control Personal Dietary Choices” [Daren Bakst, Heritage via Michelle Minton, CEI]
And in the wings: FDA readies crackdown on salt as ingredient [AP]
French law mandating disclosure of whether restaurant food is made in house isn’t going well [Baylen Linnekin, more]

Filed under: agriculture and farming, FDA, France, Hawaii, Michigan, obesity, restaurants, salt, trans-fats