BY SANDRA GUY AND MONIFA THOMAS Staff Reporters November 7, 2013 8:30AM
Updated: November 7, 2013 8:18PM
Major Chicago-area food companies Kraft Foods, Mondelez International, Hillshire Brands and McDonald’s Corp. said Thursday they are studying the details — and no doubt, the implications — of the federal government’s first-ever declaration that trans fats are unsafe and should be banned from many foods.
A spokeswoman for Deerfield-based Mondelez, formerly Kraft’s snacks business, which makes Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Cadbury chocolate and Philadelphia cream cheese, said in a press release, “Providing consumers with high quality, great tasting products is a priority for us. All of our U.S. cookies and crackers are labeled as ‘zero grams trans fat’ per serving.”
McDonald’s, based in Oak Brook, issued a statement saying the fast-food giant will monitor the latest developments, and noting that it “has made great progress in reducing trans fats across our menu.
“In 2008, McDonald’s USA reduced artificial trans fats in our fried menu items by switching to a zero-gram trans fat per labeled serving cooking oil, while also reducing the amount of artificial trans fats in our bakery menu items through recipe adjustments,” according to the statement.
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the move could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths each year.
Hamburg said that while the amount of trans fats in the country’s diet has declined dramatically in the last decade, they “remain an area of significant public health concern.” The trans fats have long been criticized by nutritionists, and New York and other local governments have banned them.
Spokesmen for Kraft, the Northfield-based maker of Maxwell House coffee and Cheez Whiz, and Chicago-based Hillshire Brands, formerly Sara Lee’s bakery and meats business that sells Ball Park Hot Dogs and Jimmy Dean’s sausages, pointed to the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association to speak on their behalf. The Grocery Manufacturers’ Association’s members are the nation’s largest food makers, including Kraft, Kellogg, and General Mills.
Association spokesman Brian Kennedy said in an email that the group and its members will give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the “information and insights it needs” to decide how long it will take and how much it will cost to require the food industry to gradually phase out all trans fats.
Other Chicago food makers, ranging from pizza to candy to pasta-sauce businesses, use no trans fats in their foods, but had mixed personal reactions to the news.
“(The federal government ) is going a bit too far; it’s up to the individual,” said John Stefanos, president of Chicago-based Cupid Candies at 7637 S. Western Ave., which makes one-pound boxes of three-layered mint Frango’s for local Macy’s stores. “Are you going to stop eating red meat? That’s my personal opinion.”
Cupid Candies uses no animal products in its products.
Jessica Grelle, owner of North Barrington-based Mama Jess organic pasta sauce maker, said she is pleased by the FDA’s action, which will have no effect on her business, but she believes it will be difficult and time-consuming to explain to people why the trans fat action is needed.
“Many of the products (with trans fats) are inexpensive junk foods,” Grelle said.
Grelle said she is concerned that food manufacturers will add more preservatives to do the same thing that trans fats are intended to do — give the foods a long shelf life.
Many companies have already phased out trans fats, prompted by new nutrition labels introduced by FDA in 2006 that list trans fats and an by an increasing number of local laws that have banned them.
Though they have been removed from many items, the fats are still found in processed foods, including in some microwave popcorns and frozen pizzas, refrigerated doughs, cookies and ready-to-use frostings. They are also sometimes used by restaurants that use the fats for frying. Many larger chains have phased them out, but smaller restaurants may still get food containing trans fats from suppliers.
The FDA isn’t yet setting a timeline for the phase-out, but it will collect comments for two months before officials determine how long it will take. Different foods may have different timelines, depending how easy it is to find a substitute.
“We want to do it in a way that doesn’t unduly disrupt markets,” says Michael Taylor, FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods. Still, he says, the food “industry has demonstrated that it is by and large feasible to do.”
To phase them out, the FDA said it had made a preliminary determination that trans fats no longer fall in the agency’s “generally recognized as safe” category, which is reserved for thousands of additives that manufacturers can add to foods without FDA review. Once trans fats are off the list, anyone who wants to use them would have to petition the agency for a regulation allowing it, and that would be unlikely to be approved.
Trans fats are widely considered the worst kind for your heart, even worse than saturated fats, which can also contribute to heart disease. Trans fats are used both in processed food and in restaurants, often to improve the texture, shelf life or flavor of foods. They are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil to make it more solid, which is why they are often called partially hydrogenated oils.
Scientists say there are no health benefits to trans fats and say they can raise levels of so-called “bad” cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease — the leading cause of death in the United States.
“The issue with trans fats is that while we know that there are good fats and bad fats,” said Jean Alves, a clinical nutritionist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “We know now that trans fat is absolutely the worst offender . . . because not only does it increase your LDL – which is your bad cholesterol – but it also decreases your HDL cholesterol — which is your good cholesterol. So it’s sort of this double whammy as far as your increase risk of heart disease.”
Alves adds: “Hopefully, this will mean that the rate of heart disease decreases, even things like [instances] of heart attack decrease, as our food supply gradually gets trans fat free.”
When companies do completely remove from trans fats from their foods, it will still be incumbent on consumers to think about total fat, added sugar and total calories, Alves said.
Contributing: Associated Press
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