Trans Fats are crap fats

Artificial fats are bad for you

People sometimes accuse the health food industry of scaremongering but they are rank amateurs compared to the slick, professional and well-organised tropical fats campaign that created national panic in the US in the 1980s. With full-page newspaper ads screaming “Stop the Poisoning of America”, the orchestrated campaign blamed palm and coconut oil for America’s heart disease epidemic. Within months every major American product had ‘no tropical fats’ on the front of the label and ‘hydrogenated fat’ on the ingredients list where natural fat had been. The American Soybean Association was pleased as punch – soya oil is the raw material for hydrogenated fat. In Britain in the 80s health authorities and hospital dieticians encouraged people to give up butter and switch to high-polyunsaturate margarines. But to have high polyunsaturate levels you need high levels of hydrogenated fat. As a result there are millions of Britons who have heart disease (they’re the lucky ones, the rest are dead) because they followed this well-meaning but misguided advice. So why do manufacturers use hydrogenated fat? If you’ve ever seen it you’d understand. It comes as fine sand-like granules that won’t melt when you hold them in your hand, but do melt at food processing temperatures. They set hard while a food product is still warm, giving structure and texture to foods as diverse as bread, biscuits, margarine and cakes. They provide a plasticky scaffolding that holds together other food ingredients, enabling more air and water to be added to a food. In 1993 Whole Earth Superspread was launched and our ad prompted a complaint from the makers of Flora to the Advertising Standards Authority because we said hydrogenated fat was bad for you. While we argued and appealed the hydrogenated fat content of Flora fell from 21% right down to less than 1%. The Interheart survey, described in 2004 by The Lancet as the most comprehensive and rigorous study ever of research into heart disease, concluded that salt, stress, dietary fat, sugar etc were all minor causes of heart disease. The two major ones, responsible for 80% of all heart disease, were smoking and an imbalance between Low Density Lipid and High Density Lipid cholesterol (the ratio should be 2:1). The issue is not how much cholesterol you have (the argument that has put millions onto anti-cholesterol drugs) but solely what the ratio is. Hydrogenated fat slows down the loss of LDL and accelerates the loss of healthy HDL cholesterol, so the ratio swings out to 3:1 or 4:1, where the LDL starts to clog up the arteries. The HDL cholesterol is slippery and lubricates the circulatory system. There are also links between hydrogenated fat consumption and obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer disease. Transfats (another name for hydrogenated fats) interfere with Omega 3 metabolism, underpinning the market for fish oil to rectify the deficiency. The track record of the health food trade is unedifying. Many vegetarian and vegan products have historically depended on hydrogenated fat. Vegetarian and vegan margarines relied heavily on it. Hydrogenated fat is now rare in a health food shop. It has always been illegal in organic products. Forget about government doing anything about transfats. It subsidises rapeseed and soya – the oils that are usually hydrogenated - to make them cheaper than natural fats. In the US the battle was finally won when a lawyer called Stephen Joseph sued McDonalds in 2003 for reneging on their promise to reduce transfats and was awarded an $8.5 million settlement. In the US transfats now have to be labelled on the nutrition information panels. Manufacturers are scrambling to replace hydrogenated fat with natural fats, aware that consumers now avoid products with the former. In Denmark no food may contain more than 2% trans fats. In Britain, thanks to consumer pressure, Marks & Spencer and Tesco have promised that by mid-2006 all their own-brand products will be free of transfats. For 30 years hydrogenated fat has been promoted by major advertisers and the National Health Service, and subsidised to keep it cheaper than natural solid fats. The cost of cheap food has been higher health costs. The Danish example offers the only way forward – ban the stuff. Now.

This Triple Whammy on Climate Might Just Hit Home

In 1990 my daughter Rima commented to her friend Dan as they choked their way across a fume-filled Harrow Road: “Wouldn’t it be nice if the drivers of these filthy cars had to plant trees to mop up the pollution they created?” Dan Morrell agreed and founded Future Forests to do just that. When we launched Whole Earth organic wholegrain cornflakes back in 1996, they became the first ‘carbon neutral’ food product. Dr. Richard Tipper of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management did a lifecycle analysis of the cornflakes to establish how many trees Future Forests should plant to balance off our CO2 emissions. We were pleasantly surprised to find the cornflakes were almost carbon neutral already – because they were organic.

A few weeks ago Future Forests invited me to a preview of The Day After Tomorrow, the blockbuster teen romance thriller whose plot revolves around a greenhouse gas disaster. This movie will move the global warming debate beyond climate scientists on one side, and the hired guns of the oil industry on the other, and put it squarely in the mass consciousness. At the launch of the Climate Group a few weeks earlier, Tony Blair told us “Commitment to preventing global warming has to transcend the electoral cycle and become a permanent part of national policy. We need the public to support us on this if we are to achieve real results.” When I asked Margaret Beckett if future emissions trading arrangements would reward the huge contribution to greenhouse gas reduction that comes from organic farming, she smiled thinly and said that she couldn’t comment on policy still under development. But Steve Howard, the Climate Group’s CEO, responded positively and the President of Timberland Boots said they already used 5% organic cotton in the lining of their boots and counted it towards their carbon reduction targets. Here are some facts. Organic farming uses half of the fossil fuels used by agrichemical farming, per unit of food; emits less nitrous oxide than agrichemical farming (a greenhouse gas 310 times more warming than carbon dioxide); absorbs one tonne of carbon per hectare into the soil every year. Combine all of these and you have an annual saving of the equivalent of 2 Gigatonnes of carbon. To bring greenhouse gas back to a stable level requires an annual reduction of 6 Gigatonnes of carbon. So if we adopted organic farming practices worldwide, including green manures, non-use of nitrates and pesticides and composting of animal manures, we would be a third of the way towards saving the planet. What does agrichemical farming offer the future? Every tonne of nitrogen fertilizer costs one tonne of carbon to manufacture and transport Nitrogen fertiliser runs off into water and becomes a nitrous oxide source - nitrous oxide is 300 times more harmful than carbon dioxide Animals eat subsidised soybeans, and fart prodigious quantities of methane into the air – methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times more harmful than CO2. Cheap subsidised feed also produces a proliferation of meat animals. Organic cows fart too, but they don’t suffer the chronic acid rumen digestive problems that lead to E.coli O157 infections in ‘normal’ cattle because 80% of their diet must be pasture or hay - cows’ natural food. And the Soil Association supports the CIWF campaign to reduce meat consumption and move from quantity to quality. I was born in Nebraska, a prairie state. When my pioneer ancestors first built their houses from prairie sod, many proudly preserved a few acres of virgin prairie so their grandchildren could see what the land was like before it went under the plough. Those bits of prairie now stand as much as 8 feet higher than the surrounding farmland – Nebraska’s shame. Unsustainable farming practices have turned all that rich organic matter into dust, sand and a hell of a lot of CO2. We are at a crucial juncture: grain prices are at historic highs, which will impact on meat prices, oil prices are at historic highs, which will make chemical fertilizers and pesticides more expensive - now public concern about global warming is about to reach historic highs. This triple whammy might be extra momentum we need to swing to organic farming - one of our planet’s best hopes for as sustainable future.

Ten years of Fair Trade

This month the Fairtrade Foundation, along with Green & Black’s Maya Gold, celebrate their 10th anniversary.

Fair trade hadn’t been invented in September 1991 when we launched Green & Black’s 70% cocoa solids – the first organic chocolate . Our biggest ethical dilemma was that it was made with the dreaded sugar. But it was organic, forest-friendly, sustainable and much lower in sugar than other chocolate. Ethically traded, it empowered Ewé tribal women in Togo – and, of crucial importance, it totally blew away your taste buds. “Guilt-free chocolate”, we called it.

Looking for further supplies, I contacted some old friends among the Maya in Belize and found that, after USAID had encouraged them all to plant cacao, they were facing ruin. Why? As soon as the aid workers had gone, Hershey’s buyer progressively reduced the price paid from $1.75 to 55¢ a pound. So we worked out a new deal for a new concept – Maya Gold - and made an offer to their cooperative, the TCGA. We offered: a five year rolling contract to grow cacao for Maya Gold paying $1.75 per pound, help to obtain organic certification, a $20,000 cash advance, and training in correct fermentation and quality control to ensure the best quality cacao.

British and UN aid experts advised the Maya strongly against going ahead with us and particularly against going organic, which they said would be a disaster. But the deal was agreed and signed.of the Fairtrade Foundation, who were looking for a first licensee. So we applied for Fairtrade certification. Maya Gold was the first product to bear their mark.

Maya Gold and the Fairtrade Mark were launched together on March 7 1994 at the BBC Good Food Show at Olympia. BBC News sent a film crew to Belize and came back with footage of Maya villagers harvesting cacao, and of their kids munching on the very first bars of Maya Gold. The story was on the afternoon and evening television news and in the press. The Independent headlined it: ”Right On – And it Tastes Good Too.” Young Methodists did an Olympic style run for fair trade, carrying a torch in relays between various English towns, haranguing supermarkets and shops to stock this first Fairtrade product. The senior confectionery buyer at Tesco phoned up: “Here, what’s this product all these vicars are phoning me about? You better come in and see me.” Fairtrade was on the map, with a product that (nicely) encapsulated its ideals. Cafédirect and Clipper soon signed up and the Fairtrade market went bananas.

For the Maya, fair trade’s benefits aren’t just economic:

- Women’s rights. Controlling the post-harvest processing (fermentation and drying) women get some or all of the money earned from the crop, which they spend on education and nutrition.

- Secondary education has increased from 10% of the kids to more than 70%

- Migratory bird populations have increased due to increased forest cover and reduced pesticide residues.

- Every Maya village is sited on a river, which serves as bath and laundry. Pesticide-related skin diseases, rashes and blisters are a thing of the past.

- As a result of working together in a successful producer cooperative the Maya have become an organised political force and recently blocked a timber project that threatened 250,000 acres of rain forest.

Now DflD has granted £240,000 to help the Maya quadruple their cacao output and improve their business skills in recognition that organic farming makes sense for unsubsidised small scale farmers. Can fair trade apply to British farmers? Although they have subsidies and welfare, they too are victims of globalisation. Forget job security or even long-term contracts when supermarkets can source food worldwide at the cheapest price.

At the beginning of the year the Soil Association launched Ethical Trade Organic Standards as a pilot scheme. In due course consumers will be able to buy organic produce knowing that a fair contract has been agreed with everyone in the food chain. Organic producers – and that includes UK ones – need a fair price, covering the cost of production, and giving a reasonable return, if family farms and artisan farmers are to survive.

Is that too much to ask for those hardworking, risk-taking producers who maintain the highest standards of animal welfare and enhance this green and pleasant land of ours?

Knowing Your Food

Most people have little idea where food comes from, but when they do, their expectations are shattered. Once they realise the huge contrast between organic farming and factory farming, they usually forget about price differences and become committed organic consumers, end of story. If that's what it takes to win people to the organic cause, how do we get the message across?

In the 1960s and 70s my brother and I had a natural foods store called Ceres Grain Shop on London's Portobello Road. Many of our customers turned up every Thursday morning for the delivery of freshly harvested vegetables brought down from Lincolnshire by John Butler. You could literally see the radiant aura of robust good health in his cabbages. He wrote for our magazine, Seed, The Journal of Organic Living, and his monthly column, Changing Seasons, enabled our 25,000 readership to get inside the head of the man who grew their vegetables. The combination of tasting the difference and understanding the underlying philosophy made them core organic consumers.

Next door in Ceres Bakery we baked bread made with flour that we milled from wheat grown by Stuart Pattison and we put up pictures of him and his horse-drawn plough working the land on which he grew the wheat for our bread. This was on the Portobello Road in the 1970s where we were in competition with 30 fruit and vegetable stallholders as well as cheap bakers, and when the yuppification of Notting Hill was just a glint in the property developers' eyes. Our customers vacuumed up the organic vegetables and queued into the street for organic wholemeal bread.

Those encounters gave me a profound faith in the wisdom of the buyer - once people are offered the link to the producer and are given the opportunity to make an informed choice, a goodly number will override considerations of price and convenience, and plug into the higher energy of being properly connected with their food source. When they do, they become a force to be reckoned with.

Last month the 2004 Soil Association National Conference's theme was Reconnecting the Public with Agriculture. The question was: how can we reawaken a passion for good food and good husbandry in the public? (ew: from programme). Saturday afternoon focused on the soil, the organic farmer's prize asset - and the very foundation of human health (programme). In the Soil, Compost and Health workshop, soil scientists produced evidence about the importance of a balanced soil using compost and other soil-building techniques. Their measure of success was improvements in plant health, significant reductions in vets' bills and increases in animal fertility. That translates, in human terms, into healthier food for people: lower NHS costs and less business for infertility clinics. Healthy soil also produces plants that heal quickly - slash a compost-grown cucumber along its sides and the gaps will close with minimal scars. Do the same to one grown with chemicals instead of compost and it goes rotten. How much proof do people need?

The Soil Association believes that seeing is believing. That is why they have a network of working organic farms that are open to the public. Last year 300,000, including legions of schoolchildren, visited. A trip to an organic farm is often all it takes to see that the soil is the foundation of all plant, animal and human health.

For some people what they see with their own eyes is not enough - they want scientific proof. One conference speaker was Paul Hepperly, research manager of Rodale Institute in America. He reported that their long-term comparison of 22 years between organic and chemical farming systems demonstrated the superiority of organic farming. Both nutritional content - and yields - were higher in the organic crops. It all came down to the soil. Hepperly berated the chemical farming system: "We've been mining soils rather than building them."

People frequently suggest that the Soil Association changes its name to 'The Organic Society' or something equally zippy. Our founders had great foresight - the answer lies in the soil and once people understand that, all the spurious questions about whether to choose organic or not go out the window.