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By Reuters,
The Food and Drug Administration’s recent decision to phase out partially hydrogenated oils, the source of most trans fat in the U.S. food supply, serves as the final nail in the coffin for the artificial ingredient in the American food industry.
The decision has sparked little controversy – surprising, given that bans of large sodas, cigarettes and Styrofoam can generate thousands of protests. However, trans fats have been widely criticized for years, and have long been on the way out in the food industry. “Trans fats were relatively easy to ban because the evidence for their harm is substantial and substitutes are available,” says Marion Nestle, a food studies professor at New York University.
Once hailed as the healthy alternative to animal fats and butter, health advocacy groups have been working to ban trans fats since the early 1990s. The FDA implemented a rule in 2006 requiring manufacturers list trans fat on nutrition labels. One year later, New York City banned the use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and spreads– the bulk of trans fat in food– in restaurants. In 2012, trans fats in school lunches were severely diminished under new guidelines issued by the Department of Agriculture.
A 2012 report of fast-food chains’ lunch receipts revealed that the average trans fat content of customers’ meals dropped from about three grams to 0.5 grams after the New York City ban was enacted.
Of course, traces of trans fat are still apparent in some of the food we eat. The most common culprits for trans fat include popcorn, canned frosting, coffee creamers and baked goods. With many of these products, consumers may not even know they’re eating trans fat; the FDA allows products with under 0.5 grams of trans fat to be classified as having zero grams trans fat on their nutrition labels.
“This is problematic as those half grams can add up – like when you eat two servings of packaged cookies or one serving of cookies with a cup of coffee with packaged coffee creamer,” says Beth Vallen, a professor at Fordham Schools of Business specializing in consumer goals and self-control in consumer health.
The FDA predicts that banning trans fats for good would prevent up to 20,000 cases of health disease and 7,000 deaths every year.
While trans fat’s demise has been met with little resistance, the question remains: what does this mean for other unhealthy foods?
“I have no idea what the FDA is working on, but I sure hope they are planning to label added sugars,” says Nestle.
Vallen says it is possible similar bans could follow. “As we understand more about the effects of [preservatives and additives] on our health, it’s certainly possible that other items may go the way of trans fats.”
Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.
“The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in the Fall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.”
Take a look at his map:
Courtesy Tufts Magazine
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Woodard lays out his map in the new book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.” Here’s how he breaks down the continent:
Yankeedom: Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.
New Netherland: The Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world when New York was founded, Woodard writes, so it’s no wonder that the region has been a hub of global commerce. It’s also the region most accepting of historically persecuted populations.
The Midlands: Stretching from Quaker territory west through Iowa and into more populated areas of the Midwest, the Midlands are “pluralistic and organized around the middle class.” Government intrusion is unwelcome, and ethnic and ideological purity isn’t a priority.
Tidewater: The coastal regions in the English colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware tend to respect authority and value tradition. Once the most powerful American nation, it began to decline during Westward expansion.
Greater Appalachia: Extending from West Virginia through the Great Smoky Mountains and into Northwest Texas, the descendants of Irish, English and Scottish settlers value individual liberty. Residents are “intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers.”
Deep South: Dixie still traces its roots to the caste system established by masters who tried to duplicate West Indies-style slave society, Woodard writes. The Old South values states’ rights and local control and fights the expansion of federal powers.
El Norte: Southwest Texas and the border region is the oldest, and most linguistically different, nation in the Americas. Hard work and self-sufficiency are prized values.
The Left Coast: A hybrid, Woodard says, of Appalachian independence and Yankee utopianism loosely defined by the Pacific Ocean on one side and coastal mountain ranges like the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas on the other. The independence and innovation required of early explorers continues to manifest in places like Silicon Valley and the tech companies around Seattle.
The Far West: The Great Plains and the Mountain West were built by industry, made necessary by harsh, sometimes inhospitable climates. Far Westerners are intensely libertarian and deeply distrustful of big institutions, whether they are railroads and monopolies or the federal government.
New France: Former French colonies in and around New Orleans and Quebec tend toward consensus and egalitarian, “among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy,” Woodard writes.
First Nation: The few First Nation peoples left — Native Americans who never gave up their land to white settlers — are mainly in the harshly Arctic north of Canada and Alaska. They have sovereignty over their lands, but their population is only around 300,000.
The clashes between the 11 nations play out in every way, from politics to social values. Woodard notes that states with the highest rates of violent deaths are in the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, regions that value independence and self-sufficiency. States with lower rates of violent deaths are in Yankeedom, New Netherland and the Midlands, where government intervention is viewed with less skepticism.
States in the Deep South are much more likely to have stand-your-ground laws than states in the northern “nations.” And more than 95 percent of executions in the United States since 1976 happened in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater and the Far West. States in Yankeedom and New Netherland have executed a collective total of just one person.
That doesn’t bode well for gun control advocates, Woodard concludes: “With such sharp regional differences, the idea that the United States would ever reach consensus on any issue having to do with violence seems far-fetched. The cultural gulf between Appalachia and Yankeedom, Deep South and New Netherland is simply too large. But it’s conceivable that some new alliance could form to tip the balance.”
Take a look at his fascinating write-up here.
