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Arts & Entertainment

Documentary Warns Against 'Killer Cookies," Other Processed Foods

Connecticut Audubon screens "inGREEDients," a documentary about trans fats.

What do the birds of America have to do with trans fats in processed food?

In the view of Jeff Cordulack, program director of Audubon Greenwich, they’re intimately related, and that’s why he chose to present the award-winning film documentary, “inGREEDients,” for a public viewing last Friday evening.

“We’re in the business of connecting man with nature,” Cordulack said of the Audubon Greenwich mission, prior to the film screening. “We encourage people to create backyard habitats, strive for energy sustainability and choose locally-sourced, organic food.”

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“With trans fats in the diet, it’s going to be hard to grow a new generation of conservationists to preserve the wonderful natural world,” said the upbeat Cordulack, himself the father of three children under the age of six.

Trans fats are the much-maligned manmade food additive that contributes nothing to nutrition while contributing significantly to heart disease, diabetes and obesity.

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“InGREEDients,” written and directed by David Burton (no relation), features interviews with leading experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and Mt. Sinai Hospital and others.

Dr. Meir Stampfer of the Harvard School of Public Health explains that humans evolved to process real food and trans fats are not real food.

“Our metabolic machinery is not capable of digesting trans fats,” he tells the camera. Their ingestion creates “a perfect storm of metabolic disaster.”

As one of the characters in the documentary, Stephen L. Joseph, a plaintiffs’ attorney, says, trans fats aren’t a cause for concern, they’re a cause of death. He successfully got Kraft Foods to take trans fats out of Oreo cookies when he filed a lawsuit in 2003 to ban sales in California. A “serving size” of three Oreos contained 5.5 grams of trans fats and won the film’s sobriquet of “killer cookies.”

Marketed as a boon for bakers 100 years ago, when Crisco was introduced to the world, trans fats are created by an industrial process that adds aluminum and cobalt under pressure to cottonseed oil to alter its molecules. The solid fat lengthens the shelf lives of bakery products and staves off rancidity of cooking oils.

In an American economy where food production accounts for one-third, trans fats, called a toxic chemical in the film, are big business.

Until a storm arose by informed consumers, aroused by the Oreo cookie case and others, it was omnipresent in fast foods, restaurants, processed foods and snacks.

The documentary tracks progress in campaigns to reduce or eliminate trans fats from the American diet. The New York City Council banned them from restaurants in 2008 and California banned them entirely the same year.

The holdout against a total ban is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the film’s characters say.

The FDA allows the food industry to label products as containing “zero trans fats” when in fact the products are allowed to contained .5 grams of trans fat per serving.

“How mad are you about that?” Cordulack asked the audience during a question and answer period following the film. “That can be changed [through consumer pressure].”

In common with ionizing radiation, Harvard’s Dr. Walter Willett says in the film, there is no safe level of trans fat consumption.

A consumer’s only recourse for now, Cordulack said, is to read the packaging labels and avoid food products containing “partially hydrogenated vegetable oils,” another name for trans fats.

But reading the food labels has its limitations, the film cautions.

In one memorable scene, a food chemist analyzes five food products sold with “zero trans fats” labels.

Each one contained trans fats, one at an alarmingly high level.

The FDA allows 14,000 chemical additives, which have never been tested for their interactive qualities, and FDA enforcement is limited, according to the film. Worse, the FDA’s trans fats labeling does not apply to the foods sold in bulk to the nation’s schools to feed 24 million children.

“Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is devastating to the heart — it’s wreaking havoc with our health,” remarks filmmaker Burton, a practicing nurse with a young daughter. “Why wasn’t I taught this as a health care provider?”

Dr. Madhu Mathur, a specialist in children’s nutrition affiliated with and chair of Stamford’s Obesity Task Force, helped introduce the film and answer questions later.

“Stay with natural food products and keep it simple,” she advised. “If your grandmother doesn’t know the ingredient, don’t eat it.”

Cordulack advised cooking with olive oil or coconut oil.

“If you can’t pronounce the ingredient, don’t eat it,” he recommended. “Asking your kids to wash their hands isn't enough to protect them." 

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