Not long ago, few of us had heard of trans fats, let alone suspected they lurked everywhere from baby cereal to microwave popcorn. Now it seems the food industry can't get rid of the harmful substance quickly enough. The latest to jump on the bandwagon is Frito Lay Canada, which said yesterday it has eliminated trans fats from the last few brands of its chips that still used them. The announcement came soon after Burlington-based Voortman became the first Canadian cookie maker to drop trans fats from its products and U.S. giant Pepperidge Farm Inc. put a trans fat-free cracker- Goldfish, a children's favourite- on the market. These are welcome moves, even if they are tardy. Tougher nutrition labelling regulations being introduced in Canada and the United States will require companies to disclose 13 specific ingredients on food packaging, including the notorious trans fats. Trans fats are made when liquid vegetable oils go through a chemical process called hydrogenation. The result is a fat that's solid at room temperature and has a longer shelf life. It's common in packaged goods such as cookies and in fast foods. Its use has increased as consumer alarm grew over the health risks associated with eating saturated, or animal, fats. Researchers have deemed any level of trans fat unsafe, citing it as a contributing factor in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. A daily intake of one gram is thought to increase the risk of heart disease by 20 per cent. The average Canadian consumes about 10 grams daily. It makes sense for smart manufacturers to remove the offending stuff from their recipes altogether, rather than have to start admitting how much of it they put in the products we feed our families. Disappointingly, Ottawa and Washington have given companies several years to comply with the new labelling rules, allowing them to use up their existing stock of packaging. That's not soon enough for New Democrat MP Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre). He has introduced a private member's bill that would ban trans fats in foods intended for human consumption. "Trans fats are the biggest public health threats since the battle against tobacco," he says. "We now know it's toxic. It's poison. We should have been warned." Martin took his cue for Bill C-473 from a law introduced in Denmark last year, limiting the amount of trans fat in processed foods. "We put the public health above the industry's interests," Danish food minister Mariann Fischer Boel said at the time. And that is as it should be. Increasing shelf life shouldn't come at any cost to human life. | 
