Trans Fat Hysteria Could Be Lawsuit Bonanza
By
Steven Milloy
The
takeover of Congress by Democrats could result
in a big payday for trial lawyers at the expense
of the feckless food industry.
Food companies like McDonald’s, KFC and
IHOP recently announced their intent to stop cooking
their foods in trans fats -- industrially-produced
vegetable oils used in a variety of food products
for their cooking, preservative and cost benefits.
The companies are reacting to widely publicized
claims that trans fats cause heart disease and
more than 1-in-5 heart attacks. Emanating from
a decade-long campaign launched by a small group
of Harvard University researchers, anti-trans
fat hysteria has been so “successful”
that New York City and Chicago have announced
moves to ban restaurant use of trans fats.
The Washington Post cheered such news in an editorial
this week, hoping that it “inspires the
federal Food and Drug Administration to catch
up” -- more on the significance of this
comment later.
The rush to judgment on trans fats is amazing
given the “science” used to power
the anti-trans fat bandwagon.
Consider the most recent review of trans fats
research published in the New England Journal
of Medicine (April 13, 2006). The review was co-authored
by Harvard’s Walter Willett, one of the
researchers leading the anti-trans fat campaign.
Willett’s primary claim about trans fats
is that they “appear to increase the risk
of coronary heart disease more than any other
macronutrient.” Willett cites three large
studies as “the strongest epidemiologic
[real-world] evidence” for this assertion.
Let’s look closely at these studies.
In the so-called “Health Professional Follow-up
Study,” more than 43,000 male health professionals
were studied for six years to examine the association
between dietary fats and heart disease. Although
the “raw” results indicated positive
correlations between trans fat consumption and
heart disease, when other confounding risk factors
for heart disease were considered, the correlation
with heart disease became statistically insignificant
and the correlation with fatal heart attacks became
inverted – that is, trans fat consumption
slightly reduced the risk of fatal heart attack!
In the “Alpha-Tocopherol Beta-Carotene Cancer
Prevention Study,” the intake of trans fats
was studied in almost 22,000 male smokers. The
study did not report a statistically significant
association between trans fat intake and non-fatal
heart attack, and only reported a questionable
weak statistical association between very high
trans fat intake and fatal heart attacks.
But given that the typical lifestyle characteristics
of smokers compared to non-smokers – lower
income, more stressful lives, worse diet, higher
alcohol consumption, and less exercise –
tend to significantly impact heart disease risk,
the men in this study are probably not good subjects
for an evaluation of trans fats in the first place.
In the third study, known as the “Nurses
Health Study,” 80,082 female nurses were
followed for 14 years to study the relationship
between dietary intake of different types of fats
and heart disease. No overall association was
reported between trans fat intake and heart disease,
although a weak statistical association was reported
for women in the top quintile of trans fat intake.
But the size of that statistical association (53
percent), however, renders it quite dubious.
As the National Cancer Institute has publicly
stated, “In epidemiologic research, [increases
in risk of less than 100 percent] are considered
small and usually difficult to interpret. Such
increases may be due to chance, statistical bias
or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes
not evident.”
So there you have it. Those flimsy-to-exculpatory
study results are what Harvard’s Willett
considers (as of April 2006) to be the “strongest
epidemiological evidence” supposedly linking
trans fat consumption with heart disease.
But if Willett’s claims about trans fats
were true, wouldn’t there be a substantial
body of consistent and convincing evidence indicating
that trans fats intake causes actual harm among
real people? After all, we’ve only been
consuming trans fats since Crisco was commercialized
in 1908 – almost 100 years.
So what’s all this got to do with this week’s
elections and trial lawyers?
So far, there have been several lawsuits filed
against food companies (like McDonald’s
and KFC) concerning trans fats. None of this has
been personal injury or class action litigation,
however, which is where the big bucks are for
trial lawyers.
Despite all the trans fat scaremongering –
aided in part by food companies caving in to trans
fat-free alarmism by reformulating cooking processes
or selling trans fat-free products – the
Food and Drug Administration still classifies
all uses of trans fats as “generally recognized
as safe.”
This classification obviously serves as a roadblock
to successful personal injury litigation. How
long trans fats will maintain their “GRAS”
status is anyone’s guess.
However, the Democrat takeover of Congress raises
concerns because trial lawyers are historically
among the Democrats’ biggest financial supporters
– almost 10 times greater than the food
industry in 2006 ($65 million vs. $7 million).
While Congress has no direct authority over the
FDA and its staff, Congress may pressure the FDA
and its leadership to change the GRAS status of
trans fats in other ways -- such as through its
investigative, appropriations and legislative
powers.
A change in the status of trans fats would clear
the way for personal injury lawyers to sue (perhaps
on a class action basis) and start collecting
big bucks for the alleged 1-in-5 heart attacks
that the Harvard cabal blames on trans fats. It
could be a multi-billion dollar payday that ranks
among the most lucrative personal injury litigation
for the lawyers.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com