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WORLD✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
How Ecuador is fighting to keep industrial trans fats off the food shelf
Filed 55m ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Muhammad Mujib Uddin · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Health advocates, academics and officials gathered in Quito over three days to discuss Ecuador's struggle to regulate industrial trans fats, which the WHO links to over 278,000 deaths worldwide each year and more than 150,000 in the Americas.
Ecuador's Ministerial Agreement 4439 caps trans fats at two grams per 100 grams of fat, matching the WHO's recommended limit, but it does not expressly cover every final processed product and does not ban the partially hydrogenated oils that create the problem in the first place.
Speakers including Beatriz Champagne of Coalición América Saludable and PAHO's Daniel Antiporta framed the issue as systemic rather than personal, pointing to marketing budgets that favor cheap processed foods over fresh, local alternatives.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A rule that forgets to mention the thing it is regulating is less a law than a suggestion with a letterhead. Ecuador matched the WHO's number on paper, then left the actual hydrogenated oil sitting right there on the shelf like it was never the point. Good intentions measured in grams per 100 grams don't stop a heart attack if the loophole is big enough to drive a bakery truck through.
