According to Judith Shaw in her book, Trans Fats, two events launched the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (trans fat) industry. The first was legislation passed by Congress in 1956 to build an interstate highway system. This enabled fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and Chili’s to spread across the country. Because partially hydrogenated vegetable oils had a long shelf life, cookies, french fries, fried chicken, and fried fish could now be transported across the country without preservation. The second piece of legislation that was a boon to trans fats passed on September 6, 1958: the Food Additives Amendment. The amendment, which was intended to protect Americans from potentially dangerous additives, stated, “A food shall be deemed to be adulterated if it bears or contains any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render it injurious to health.” Unfortunately, food additives used before 1958 (like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils), didn’t require FDA approval. Trans fats had been grandfathered in.
In the 1980s, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils became the single most popular product for all baking and frying. By 2001, hydrogenation became the fourth largest food manufacturing process in the world. Also in 2001, the CDC released its data on the annual incidence of heart disease in the United States: 12.6 million Americans had coronary artery disease; 5.4 million had medical procedures for heart disease; and 500,000 people died from heart attacks and related strokes. The price tag for heart disease was about $300 billion a year.
By pummeling companies that used tropical oils like coconut and palm oil and animal fats like butter—all of which were high in what were believed to be evil saturated fats—CSPI and NHSA had inadvertently caused Americans to use a far more dangerous product: trans fats. Suddenly products like margarine, which contained 25 percent trans fats, became the “healthy alternative.” By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of products were made using partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Because they were cheap, kosher, and promoted as heart-healthy alternatives, they flew off the shelves.
—
IN 1981, A GROUP OF Welsh researchers sounded the first alarm, publishing a paper claiming that the trans fats contained in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils were linked to heart disease. Nine years later, in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, two Dutch researchers published findings supporting the Welsh study. For the first time, Americans were starting to realize that not all unsaturated fats were good for you. In 1993, a study done by Harvard researchers showed that if people replaced just 2 percent of the energy from trans fats with other unsaturated fats, they could decrease their risk of heart disease by 33 percent; another study showed that the same decrease in trans fat intake could lessen the risk of heart disease by 53 percent. The Harvard School of Public Health later estimated that eliminating trans fats from the American diet would prevent 250,000 heart attacks and related deaths every year!
Unlike studies of total fat, total cholesterol, and unsaturated fats—where findings had been contradictory or inconclusive—no researcher has ever published a paper showing that trans fats are anything other than one of the most harmful products ever made. As researchers got better at understanding that not all unsaturated fats were the same, the problem with trans fats became painfully clear.
—
WHAT ABOUT CHOLESTEROL? Wasn’t cholesterol found in the coronary arteries of people suffering from atherosclerosis? Although it is true that cholesterol, which is an essential component of cells, was found in the fatty streaks that blocked coronary arteries, one particular type of cholesterol was present: low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, otherwise known as bad cholesterol. The reason that health advocates warned against products that were high in saturated fats was that saturated fats increase LDL cholesterol. But what these advocates didn’t realize at the time was that there are two different types of LDL cholesterol. There’s the big, fluffy type, which isn’t harmful, and the small, dense type—called very low-density lipoprotein or vLDL cholesterol—which is quite harmful. Saturated fats increase the not-so-bad type of LDL cholesterol but don’t increase the very bad vLDL cholesterol.
Another type of cholesterol is actually good for you. Called high-density lipoprotein or HDL cholesterol, it removes vLDL from coronary arteries and transports it to the liver where it can be eliminated from the body. Saturated fats neither increase nor decrease the quantity of HDL cholesterol in the blood.
So, in summary, neither saturated fats nor certain types of cholesterol are necessarily bad for you. Trans fats are a different story. Not only do trans fats dramatically increase vLDL, the worst kind of cholesterol, but they also dramatically decrease HDL, the helpful cholesterol. For that reason, in 2006, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine declared, “On a per calorie basis, trans fats appear to increase the risk of coronary heart disease more than any other macronutrient.”
—
ALTHOUGH THE FOOD AND ADDITIVES AMENDMENT had stated that additives used before 1958 did not require FDA approval, one clause in the bill did allow the FDA to act: “Foods must be examined in the light of current scientific information if their use is to be continued.” Health activists first petitioned the FDA to limit the use of trans fats in 1994. In 1999, five years later, the FDA finally announced that it would devise a plan to limit the consumption of trans fats. Three years passed. Nothing happened. On July 10, 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) made a statement designed to shock the FDA into action. The IOM reported that no amount of trans fats was safe, recommending an “upper intake level of zero.” At the time that the IOM drew a line in the sand, 95 percent of cookies, 80 percent of frozen breakfast foods, 75 percent of snacks and chips, 70 percent of cake mixes, and 50 percent of cereals contained trans fats.
Public advocacy groups eventually regretted their role in inadvertently promoting unsaturated fats containing trans fats. In 2004, the executive director of CSPI said, “Twenty years ago, scientists, including me, thought trans fats were innocuous. Since then, we’ve learned otherwise.” A year later, Walter Willett, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, told the New York Times, “A lot of people had made their careers telling people to eat margarine instead of butter. When I was a physician in the 1980s, that’s what I was telling people to do and unfortunately we were often sending them to their graves prematurely.”
—
WHEN HEALTH ADVOCATES THOUGHT cholesterol or total fat or saturated fats increased the risk of heart disease, they simply launched public relations campaigns to inform consumers. Trans fats, on the other hand, were so clearly dangerous that their presence in foods launched government efforts to ban them. It started in Europe.
On January 1, 2004, Denmark introduced legislation to restrict trans fats to no more than 2 percent of the total fat in any food. Consumption of trans fats fell from 4.5 grams a day per person in 1975 to 2.2 grams in 1993 to 1.5 grams in 1995 to almost 0 grams by 2005. By 2010, the incidence of heart disease and related deaths in Denmark had dropped 60 percent.
On January 1, 2006—12 years after it had first been petitioned to act—the FDA finally announced its plan, which required manufacturers of packaged foods to list the quantity of trans fats on every nutrition label. By the end of the year, 84 percent of Americans had heard of trans fats and at least half could correctly identify their health risks. Kentucky Fried Chicken voluntarily eliminated trans fats followed by Applebee’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell, and Starbucks. Some of the nation’s largest food suppliers, like Kraft, Sodexo, and Frito-Lay, which makes Doritos, Tostitos, and Cheetos, also eliminated their use of trans fats. By 2008, the amount of trans fats in prepared foods had decreased by half. By 2012, trans fats had been eliminated from an estimated 10,000 products and had been banned from restaurants in at least 13 U.S. jurisdictions. New York City, for example, asked 20,000 restaurants and 14,000 food suppliers to eliminate their use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats.
>
There is, however, one unfortunate loophole. If products contain less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, the FDA allows manufacturers to claim 0 grams of trans fats on the nutrition label. Because many products contain slightly less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, it’s still possible to consume more than the 2-gram limit of trans fats a day set by the American Heart Association. For example, crème-filled sponge cakes contain 0.46 gram of trans fats but are listed as having 0 grams on the label. And microwave popcorn, which contains 0.25 gram of trans fats, also is listed as having 0 grams. Trans fats are also still contained in some brands of margarines and coffee creamers. And they’re still contained in Berger cookies. The key to avoiding the problem of hidden trans fats is to look for the phrase “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the nutrition label.
—
EVERY FEW YEARS the Society of German Chemists gives out its Wilhelm Normann Award for outstanding contributions to fat research and fat science. Ironic, given that Normann’s process for converting unsaturated fats to trans fats has probably caused more disease and death than any other man-made chemical reaction in history.
—
SO, WHAT’S THE TAKE-HOME LESSON? Could any of this have been avoided? Again, as was the case with painkillers, it’s all about the data. In the late 1970s, when the McGovern committee stated that total fat intake should be less than 30 percent of total calories, data weren’t available to make such a strong recommendation. Similarly, when recommendations about which type of fat should be preferred were being made, studies were conflicting. Although several studies showed that saturated fats might increase the rate of heart disease, one Welsh study published at the same time showed exactly the opposite: Unsaturated fats increased the risk of heart disease, dramatically. This conflict should have at least given us pause. But it didn’t. Ill-founded promises had been let out of the box, and American tables proudly served margarine as the “heart-healthy” alternative to butter when it was exactly the opposite.
CHAPTER 3
BLOOD FROM AIR
“For earth is full of evils. And the sea is full.”
—Hesiod, The Works and Days
We’re not that complicated.
Although we come in different shapes and sizes, heights and weights, and backgrounds and temperaments, and although we have different genes that make different proteins and different enzymes, we all boil down to four essential elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. If any one of these elements becomes unavailable, our time on Earth will end.
Three of the four elements are easily obtained.
Hydrogen comes from the water we drink, which consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O). Oxygen, not surprisingly, comes from the air we breathe (O2). (Only fish, through their gills, can extract oxygen from water.) Carbon also comes from the air. Green plants, in the presence of sunlight, take carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and capture it in the form of complex sugars that contain carbon (this is called photosynthesis). We get our carbon from eating plants or from eating animals that ate the plants. Either way, because air and water are abundant, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon are also abundant.
The weakest link in the cycle of life is nitrogen, which comes only from soil. When farmers grow crops like corn, wheat, barley, potatoes, or rice, they deplete nitrogen from the soil. If they don’t replace it, the soil won’t be rich enough to grow more crops. Farmers replenish nitrogen in three ways. They use natural fertilizers made from decaying plants or animal manure. They rotate their crops with legumes like chickpeas, alfalfa, peas, soybeans, or clover, which harbor bacteria in their roots that take nitrogen from the air and convert it into a usable form in the soil—a process called “nitrogen fixation.” Or they wait for thunderstorms; lightning, as it turns out, can also fix nitrogen from the air.
If every farmer in every country on every continent in the world used every inch of fertile land, sprinkled their fields with natural fertilizers, meticulously rotated their crops, and convinced everyone to eat a vegetarian diet, they could feed about four billion people. But, as of 2016, more than seven billion people roamed the Earth. And although pockets of people are starving, the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough food. There’s plenty of food. The problem is that we don’t do a good enough job of distributing it to those who need it.
So how are farmers able to do this? How are they able to feed so many people? The answer lies in an event that occurred on July 2, 1909. Because of this singular moment, 50 percent of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from natural sources and 50 percent comes from the work of one man—a man who at once saved our lives and sowed the seeds of our destruction.
—
FRITZ HABER WAS BORN ON December 9, 1868, in Breslau, Germany. His parents, Siegfried and Paula, were first cousins, marrying despite their family’s objections. Tragedy soon followed.
Three weeks after Fritz was born, on New Year’s Eve, Paula died from complications of the birth. Siegfried never recovered. Sinking deep into a depression, he buried himself in his work, ignoring his son. As a consequence, Fritz was raised by his aunts, a grandmother, and a housekeeper. Seven years after Paula died, Siegfried remarried, had three daughters in five years, and became a loving, attentive father—to his daughters. He continued, however, to ignore his son, whose presence constantly reminded him of his first wife’s death. Fritz spent much of his young life trying to win his father’s approval, without success.
One event underlined their broken relationship. After Fritz graduated from high school, he celebrated late into the night at a local pub. Breakfasts at Siegfried Haber’s house, however, began at 7:15 a.m. sharp, no excuses, no exceptions. When Siegfried saw that Fritz was still sleeping, he paraded his daughters into his son’s bedroom. “Look well!” he warned them. “This is how the life of a drunkard begins!” Forty years later—still unable to reconcile his father’s distance and disappointment—Fritz Haber wept while telling this story to a friend.
Failing to win the love of his father, Fritz sought the love of his fatherland, which, despite his enormous accomplishments, would later reject him in the cruelest manner possible.
When he was 19, Fritz entered Heidelberg University. There, under the mentorship of Robert Bunsen, he fell in love with chemistry, studying light emissions from the newly invented Bunsen burner. Unlike his peers, Haber didn’t aspire to the life of an academic; he wanted to do something practical, something that made a difference, something that revolutionized an industry. So he left the university and worked in a distillery in Budapest, a fertilizer factory near Auschwitz, and a textile company near Breslau.
When he was 22, Haber returned to Berlin to attend the Charlottenburg Institute of Technology to work with Carl Liebermann, the first scientist to synthesize alizarin, a popular red dye. Fritz saw synthetic dyes as the future, a perfect marriage of his love of chemistry with his insatiable need for his father’s approval. Siegfried Haber bought and sold natural dyes; his son fully expected that he would lead his father’s company out of the dark ages of natural dyes and into the bright new era of synthetic dyes.
But Fritz didn’t distinguish himself as a businessman. In 1892, when a cholera epidemic swept through the port in Hamburg, Germany, Fritz convinced his father to buy all available stores of chloride of lime, the only known disinfectant. When the epidemic quickly subsided, the Habers were stuck with a product of little value. Siegfried called his son a fool and fired him. “Go to a university!” he shouted. “You don’t belong in business!”
At the age of 26, Fritz Haber left the dye business to attend the University of Karlsruhe. There, on the Rhine River just south of Heidelberg, he did something that most chemists at the time thought was impossible. For this single discovery, Fritz Haber would win the Nobel Prize. But when he went to Stockholm to receive it, several other Nobel Prize winners boycotted the event, unable to reconcile the atrocities he had committed.
—
IN THE FALL OF 1898, in a music hall in Bristol, En
gland, Sir William Crookes got up to speak. Crookes was the president of the British Academy of Sciences. A chemist and physicist, he had discovered a new element (thallium) and invented a cathode ray tube that would later be used in televisions and computers. The year before his lecture, the Queen of England had knighted him. William Crookes had spent most of his career being right. When he got up to speak, people listened.
Everyone in attendance assumed that Crookes would do what all former presidents of the academy had done: bore them with a list of accomplishments by British scientists. But Crookes went off script with a speech that would later be called one of the best of the century. “England and all nations stand in deadly peril,” he began. Crookes explained how advances in science and medicine had created a dilemma. People were living longer. As a result, there were more mouths to feed. Given that all the great plains on Earth were already being farmed, that each acre could feed only about ten people, and that cities were becoming increasingly more populated, it was only a matter of time before there wouldn’t be enough food. People of “the civilized nations,” said Crookes, were on the verge of starving to death.
Crookes predicted that the dying would begin sometime in the 1930s. First it would be thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. Although scientists argued about when this would start, no one argued that it would start. The population was growing faster than the world’s capacity to feed it. The solution, said Crookes, was in the production of synthetic, nitrogen-containing fertilizer. Scientists needed to find a way to fix nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form that was usable in soil. Nitrogen fixation by legumes and lightning wasn’t going to be enough. “The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilized humanity,” he said. “It is the chemist who must come to our rescue. Through the laboratory, starvation can be turned into plenty.”
Pandora's Lab Page 5