Better Butter: Road to trans fat bans paved with food labels

People want to know what they are eating.

Not everyone, of course. (Witness the recent comeback of the Twinkie.) But food packaging has become increasingly complex over the past three decades because people and their government representatives have demanded to know what’s inside packaged foods.

Healthy food advocates are a big driver of this trend, raising the banner of “knowledge is power” and arguing that food labels will lead to healthier eating.

There are two main ways food labels can create change. First, when companies know that they have to list a certain ingredient on a food label, they might decide to take the ingredient out of the product altogether. (How do you call your product “all natural” and then list 15 different hard-to-pronounce food additives?) Second, consumers who are paying attention to certain ingredients – sodium, sugar, fat, protein – will use the labels to guide their decisions.

People with allergies appreciate labels, too.

Trans fats are among the latest additions to the side of your box of cereal or can of soup. And, if you are paying attention, you would know that you should be looking for no trans fat content or very little. Putting the ingredient on the label is often the first step toward setting a limit on how much trans fat can be in food.

Several countries are good case studies for what we might see coming soon in the United States, which required trans fats to appear on food labels in 2006.

Let’s start with Brazil.

While country governments and the WHO were working on a comprehensive set of recommendations on diet and health – including trans fats limits – Brazil was starting to take action. In 2003, Brazil became one of the first countries in the world to require food manufacturers to report the trans-fat content per serving on labels. Note that Canada often claims to be the first country to institute trans fat labeling requirements, but that country’s rules did not go into effect until 2006.

The law allows companies to make claims of “zero trans” or “trans free” on the packaging if the amount of trans fats per serving is 0.2 grams or less. Anything above that has to be listed on the food label.

The labeling, so far, has had mixed results. Take the example of margarine. One study in 2009 found that half of the manufacturers violated the law by not including trans fat levels on product labels.

Nearby, in Argentina, labels have turned into limits. Argentina followed Brazil’s lead with a label law in 2006. Then, in 2010, a new law was put into effect that put food manufacturers on notice. Within two years, they were required to meet a limit on vegetable oils of no more than 2 percent trans fat as a percentage of total fat content. The food industry had four years to bring trans fats down to 5 percent or less of total fat content in other foods.

How is the industry responding? They are finding alternatives, including a sunflower oil variation, which bakeries are using for the croissants known as medialunas, or half moons, a typical breakfast in Buenos Aires.

Lorena Allemandi, director of the healthy food policies area in the Argentine branch of the InterAmerican Heart Foundation (IAHF), told Fabiana Frayssinet, a reporter for Inter Press Service, that the new limits wouldn’t kill the medialuna.

“If they’re free of trans fats, they won’t disappear.”

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[Photo by David via Flickr.]