Cross-posted to BlogsCanada.
I totally missed the vote on trans fat this week. I must have been too ensconced in this whole Greatest Canadian thingy. If you missed it too, here’s the deal:
In a vote Tuesday evening, the House of Commons passed an NDP motion that would ban processed trans fats from food sold in Canada within a year. NDP Leader Jack Layton introduced the motion last Wednesday, prompting a day of debate and Ottawa’s quick announcement of a task force to recommend strategies and healthy alternatives.
The margin of victory on the vote was signficant, 193-73. What’s interesting is that the Yea votes are from across the parties. Despite this being an NDP bill, there’s plenty of Conservative Party support (and I don’t think this is minority government politicking).
I’ve been flumoxed by the nanny state issue for years. I was listening to Cross Coutry Checkup this afternoon (worst theme music for a CBC radio program ever), and they were discussing this issue. One caller paraphrased Trudeau and said that “the government doesn’t have any business in the cupboards of Canadians”. She made a good point. But then I read this sort of science:
In 1997, a New England Journal of Medicine study found eating one gram of trans fats a day for a decade increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by 20 per cent. Since then, there have been a host of other studies warning of the dangers of consuming too much.
Recent research out of Harvard Medical School, for example, has shown high trans fat intake represents a significant risk for developing premature diabetes.
One gram a day? Here’s another article (thanks, AnomalyP) on the dangers of trans fats.
The current strategy on dangerous consumables it to tax them. This seems like a satisfactory middle road, as the extra income presumably offsets the heatlhcare costs incurred because of irresponsible usage. Maybe we should just tax products with trans fats in them? Make a Snickers bar cost three bucks.
I was thinking of these things as I stood in the candy aisle at the 7-11 today. I had a Slurpee in one hand and peanuts in the other. I bought both. I looked around the store, though, and tried to imagine the shelves without products that contained trans fats. They’d be nearly empty.
If the government’s for real on this one, I’d consider investing in some canola oil companies.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
It makes more sense to ban trans fats than to tax them. Industry needs a strong incentive to stop using partially hydrogenated fat.
The average Canadian eats eight grams of trans fats a day. Eating one gram a day raises your chance of heart disease by 20%. Most chips, muffins, scones, crackers, salad dressing, doughnuts, pizza, fries, and margarine contain trans fats. In fact, if you heat soy, corn, safflower, cottonseed, CANOLA, or any fat to a high heat, it can turn into a trans fat.
For many years, food processors marketed their products as being healthy for containing trans fats. The idea was that saturated animal fats were bad, but that vegetable-derived monunsaturated fats were good. However, trans fats actually take on many of the properties of saturated fats — they aren’t good.
A tax has the effect of raising revenues and curbing consumption. It won’t eliminate consumption. In fact, it diverts money to the bad activity (to pay for health care) and reduces the money the trans fat eater had available for other pursuits. This is not good for the economy. If the government taxes all points of production, companies have less money to spend on other activities. This is also bad for the economy. Moreover, in both cases, the tax would need to amount to more than the cost of switching to non-trans fats, or else it would still be cheaper to eat trans fats. And cheap is the raison d’etre for trans fats.
Trans fats can be substituted, unlike alcohol, marijuana, or tobacco. Food processors could easily use non-hydrogenated fats and still have the same products. So there’s no need to worry about an underground economy for doughnuts and pizza.
I try to avoid trans fats. I check labels and only buy trans fat-free crackers, potato chips, and retail bakey products. However, it’s awfully hard to check the contents of a muffin at Bread Garden or to tell if a restaurant is truthful in saying it uses trans fat-free canola oil.
Also, most people don’t know trans fats are bad. People don’t read food labels. Last week, the Sun reported that only nine percent of Vancouverites (the health conscious Canadians) check for trans fats. How much would a public education campaign cost, when it’s taken 30 years to get people to cut smoking, and 1/4 people still smoke?