Hurdles in the dash against fat

Not all fatty acids are bad for you. But trans-fatty acids have been linked to heart diseases and conditions as hypertension, increasing the burden of non-communicable diseases around the world. To understand what transfats are, consider your butter and margarine. Butter is your butterfat from animal. Margarine is imitation butter made from processed—and sometimes, altered—vegetable […]

Not all fatty acids are bad for you. But trans-fatty acids have been linked to heart diseases and conditions as hypertension, increasing the burden of non-communicable diseases around the world.

To understand what transfats are, consider your butter and margarine. Butter is your butterfat from animal. Margarine is imitation butter made from processed—and sometimes, altered—vegetable oils.

The processing produces fats and oils with longer shelf lives and probably better taste. That is what the food industry needs to keep their products good and you coming back for now.

But the processing also introduces something called “trans unsaturated fatty acids” into the fats and oils used in cooking and baking.

It is not certain how much transfat Nigerians consume in daily diets—and diets vary across the country’s over 300 ethnic groups.

An international action package to replace industrially-produced transfat is top on the World Health Organisation agenda by 2023.

It recommends limiting total transfat intake to less than 1% of your total energy intake. In plain speak, that is around 2.2g of transfat a day in a diet of no less than 2,000 calories.

Countries like Denmark instituted limits on foods both in restaurants and imported years before the WHO recommendation captured in global health agency’s “REPLACE” package—”replacing transfats”

The ICON project [ Improving the Cardiovascular Health of Nigeria] has taken the vanguard in Nigeria, and pushing food regulators to review the country’s policy of fats and oils.

The move is to restrict transfat content in available foods to less than 2%. But that move is stuck without full view of Nigerian dietary landscape.

A technical working group for ICON for the second time early March will consider how the country’s anti-fat brigade can move forward.

“The first step is to research the amount of transfat in our daily foods—palm oil, different levels in vegetable oils, the foods we eat generally,” said Dr Francis Faduyile, president of the Nigerian Medical Association, which leads the project.

ICON recently submitted a memo to the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control to help the regular package “clearcut polices and actions” to mitigate the effect of consumption of trans fatty acids in publicly available foods.

The regulator is also expected to be part of initial research into the levels of transfat in local Nigerian diets—and possible alternatives.

Until now researchers are yet to produce comprehensive study of transfat in Nigerian food—and ICON technical working group is only beginning to receive commitment of researchers willing to study knowledge, attitude and perceptions toward fat content in available fats and oils.

It boils down to reducing heart problems and sudden deaths. More than 500,000 such deaths globally in 2010 were attributed to increased consumption of transfat, according to WHO.

It also comes down to change in dietary habits, said Faduyile.

“Although we have not empirically done research to confirm the actual percentage, we have research dotted here and there [showing so]. What we do is a population-based study, and that the next step,” he said.

The study is expected to profile foods for transfat content, indicate what alternatives are available. The data itself could be used to arm regulators like NAFDAC and Customs to ensure foods considered “not healthy for us do not come into the country,” said Faduyile.