Free Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig Page A

competes with hydrogenated fats because it can be used as a shortening.
    The following year, the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health urged that low-fat foods should be more widely available. Project LEAN (Low-Fat Eating for America Now), sponsored by the J. Kaiser Family Foundation and a host of establishment groups such as the AHA, the American Dietetic Association, the American Medical Association, the USDA, the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control, and the NHLBI, announced a publicity campaign to “aggressively promote foods low in saturated fat and cholesterol in order to reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer.”
    Other scientists too were attempting to make the public aware of their concerns about partially hydrogenated fats. Fred Kummerow at the University of Illinois, blessed with independent funding and an abundance of patience, carried out a number of studies published in scientific journals between the early 1970s and the present, indicating that trans fats increased risk factors associated with heart disease, and that fabricated foods such as Egg Beaters, which are made with vegetable oils, cannot support life. George Mann, formerly with the Framingham project, possessed neither funding nor patience—he was, in fact, very angry with what he called the “diet/heart scam.” His independent studies of the Masai in Africa, described earlier, had convinced him that the lipid hypothesis was “the public health diversion of this century…the greatest scam in the history of medicine.” Mann resolved to bring the issue before the public by organizing a conference in Washington, D.C., in November of 1991.
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    Mary Enig Remembers
    In 1989, I joined Frank McLaughlin, director of the Center for Business and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, in testimony before the National Food Processors Association. It was a closed conference, for NFPA members only. We had been invited to give “a view from academia.” I presented a number of slides and warned against singling out classes of fats and oils for special pejorative labeling. A representative from Frito-Lay took umbrage at my slides, which listed amounts of trans fats in Frito-Lay products.
    I offered to redo the analyses if Frito-Lay would fund the research. “If you’d talk different, you’d get money” was the response. (Ironically, Frito-Lay now claims that their products contain no trans fats.) Next, I urged the association to endorse accurate labeling of trans fats in all food items, but conference participants—including representatives from most of the major food processing giants—preferred a policy of “voluntary labeling” that was lax in alerting the public to the presence of trans fats in their products. It has taken over 15 years for the FDA to mandate trans fats labeling, and that was done only after a committee of scientists concluded that processed trans fats are unsafe at any level. The new labeling is due on January 1, 2006. It’s good to have your research validated after all these years—but we have a long way to go, because these agencies still condemn saturated fats, saying they’re “as bad as trans fatty acids.”
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    “Hundreds of millions of tax dollars are wasted by the bureaucracy and the self-interested Heart Association,” he wrote in his invitation to participants. “Segments of the food industry play the game for profits. Research on the true causes and prevention is stifled by denying funding to the ‘unbelievers.’ This meeting will review the data and expose the rascals.”
    The meeting did take place, but several speakers dropped out at the last minute, leading Mann to comment, “Scientists who must go before review panels for their research funding know well that to speak out, to disagree with this false dogma of Diet/Heart, is a fatal error. They must comply or go unfunded. I could show a list of scientists who said to me, in effect, when I invited them to