Dr. Mary Enig doesn’t look like someone who would inspire fear or animosity in anybody, much less the nation’s behemoth food industry and the army of lobbyists that backs it up. With her thick glasses and bramble of gray hair, Enig, who uses a walker, seems more of an endearing grandmother. Her sentences tend to wander off into minutiae—about her husband’s work or a recent snag at the post office. She doesn’t slice through issues with the acuity of a scientist. Yet some 30 years ago, as a graduate student, Enig stumbled upon research suggesting that the official line being touted by the government and the corporate food world was probably a long way from the truth. In the years that followed, she pursued the matter with a vengeance. And she still has the enemies to prove it.
“Here’s the paper I wrote that made me realize just how much hot water I could get myself into on this issue,” says Enig, shuffling through files in the suburban Maryland offices of the consulting firm Enig and Associates, where she is director of the nutritional services division. Even at age 73, the semi-retired Enig manages to exude an air of industry and determination. She pulls out a folder now wilting with age and waves a 1978 article published in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. In it, she argued that a major government report correlating cancer with saturated fats was, in fact, wrong. The data cited in the report showed a much stronger link between cancer and trans fats, asserted Enig, and deserved further study.
“Not too long after that, these two guys from the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils—the trans fat lobby, basically—visited me and, boy, were they angry,” she recalls. “They said they’d been keeping a careful watch to prevent articles like mine from coming out in the literature and didn’t know how this horse had gotten out of the barn.”
By now most everybody has heard about trans fats. Present in a great many cookies, candies, cakes, crackers, margarines, and fried foods, they were all over the news last July, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that, beginning in 2006, it would require manufacturers to print information about the substance on nutrition labels.
The decision came shortly after a report issued in 2002 by the National Academy of Sciences—the government’s definitive authority on all matters scientific—revealed findings that were incontestably grim. Trans fats were found to raise the bad kind of cholesterol, called LDL, and to lower HDL, the good kind. In short, the NAS discovered, they cause heart disease.
And that may be the least of it. Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard Medical School, who oversees the largest ongoing dietary study in America and is a recognized authority on trans fats, has found that for every 4 to 5 grams of trans fat you eat, your risk of heart disease nearly doubles. (He estimates that, on average, Americans consume some 5 to 6 grams of trans fats daily.) By Willett’s calculation, of the half million Americans who die prematurely each year from heart disease—the leading cause of death in this country—at least 30,000 are killed by trans fats. Other studies have suggested (but not yet proven) significant links between trans fats and type 2 diabetes as well as asthma. Some research suggests that fetal development—especially with respect to birth weight and the central nervous system—could also be adversely affected by trans fats, and that their presence in breast milk is detrimental to other, essential fats that keep babies healthy.
Another exiled food item. It sometimes seems as if dietary guidelines are issued by a mercurial emperor. Saturated fats, once considered an angry terrorist to your arteries, are now considered by many scientists to be allies in some respects. Tropical oils, formerly the subject of full-page newspaper ads claiming that they practically kill on contact, are also being welcomed back into the fat fold.
Even more galling than the constantly changing information we get from so-called authorities, though, is the question of how something as harmful as trans fats managed to make its way into 40 percent of baked goods (cookies, crackers, cakes, etc.) despite warnings dating back nearly 50 years.
Trans fats are a multibillion dollar a year industry; companies that hydrogenate oils include Bunge Foods, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland. (And the list of manufacturers that use trans fats in their products accounts for almost every major company in the food industry: Kraft, Nabisco, Kellogg, and Nestlé are just a few.) Many of the companies that hydrogenate are represented by the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils, which for decades has been quietly working to squelch bad news about trans fats. As far back as 1968, the ISEO was mentioned in an internal memo written by the medical director of the American Heart Association: According to the memo, the ISEO objected to the AHA’s intention to include a warning about trans fats in its dietary guidelines; subsequently, the AHA took it out. (No one at the agency has any recollection of this incident, and though Dr. Rose Marie Robertson, the AHA’s current chief science officer, admits that the agency “often talks to the industry,” she stresses that she “has never seen a corporate issue be a deciding factor in anything [she’s] been involved in.”)
“Even when I was a graduate student,” says Enig, who didn’t return to school until she had raised three kids and was in her thirties, “I couldn’t understand why all these scientists, as well as the American Heart Association and the like, were all blaming saturated fats for the rise in heart disease.” After all, she reasoned, heart disease started going up just as Americans were cutting back on butter. Enig figured the answer must lie elsewhere, possibly lurking in the foods Americans had been steered toward as a supposedly healthy alternative to butter: vegetable oils, margarine, more processed foods. “The trans fat question was just out there,” she remembers, “and no one was studying it.”
Trans fats came to America from—of all places—Germany, the land of pork sausage and Muenster cheese, a land famously unafraid of fat in all its glorious, natural variations. In 1901, after a French chemist had devised a way to alter matter by bombarding it with hydrogen atoms, a German scientist figured out how to apply that technology to convert oils into solids. These solid oils, called “partially hydrogenated,” contain trans fats, and their debut as a food product came in the form of margarine. (Small amounts of trans fats are found naturally in foods like dairy products and meat, but they are chemically different and occur in such small amounts as to be almost negligible.)
Margarine did not get a warm welcome in this country in the early 1900s. The dairy and meat industries weren’t keen to have it supplant butter and lard, then staples of the American diet. Many states responded to industry pressure by passing “margarine laws” that limited the sale and distribution of this new rival. Even the pleasant yellow color of margarine, made to mimic butter, was prohibited. (Early margarines came in white blocks, to evade the color ban, with a dye capsule that you had to knead into them.) But margarine, unlike butter, didn’t melt on hot days and was, above all else, cheap. Following President Truman’s abolition of the margarine laws, in 1950, margarine manufacturers began selling it as it appears today, in quantities that, since about 1970, have been twice those of butter.
One boon to margarine manufacturers was the growing consensus in the 1970s that saturated fats cause heart disease. Butter and lard were out. For the multitude of packaged products with saturated fats on the ingredient list, a replacement had to be found, and trans fats became the solution. They gave products both a long shelf life and the rich mouthfeel, as the industry calls it, that consumers like. Moreover, trans fats gave products an edge because they were cholesterol-free, another dietary priority to emerge in the ’70s. Margarine manufacturers used the slogan “Healthy for Your Heart” and marketed the product like a drug to doctors.
How is it this line of thinking went unquestioned for so long? In Europe, Canada, and the U.S., a scattering of people pursued trans fats research from the 1960s on, but the studies were very expensive and, according to one researcher, “not very glamorous.” More importantly, those taking on this stepchild of a topic had to deal with the tidal wave of industry pressure unleashed against them at meetings, conferences, and events. Their papers were rebutted with unusual ferocity, and their research funding was scarce.
Dr. Thomas Applewhite and Dr. J. Edward Hunter, industry scientists employed, respectively, by Kraft and Procter & Gamble (which held the original U.S. patent for trans fats), were the principal forces behind this criticism. Given that they worked for two food giants, the potential for bias was apparent, but their ability to fund research (as well as their own encyclopedic knowledge of the field) meant they could exercise considerable influence.
“Applewhite and Hunter worked behind the scenes,” says Dr. Randall Wood, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University who has researched trans fats. “I would say they had ways of finding out if a paper was going to be reviewed on a subject. There were papers, ironclad, indisputable evidence, and the reviews would be so negative. You’d get paranoid.”