February 14, 2005

Going in Circles, Precautionary Style

By Jeff Stier, Esq.

Back when Jaws was scaring us on the big screen in the 1970s, Americans
were being warned of a more subtle danger.  On television and in the
papers, we were told that saturated fats, the type found in some meat
and dairy products and in some processed foods, were on the verge of
causing an epidemic of heart disease.

Though our knowledge about the risks associated with saturated fats was
limited and information about alternatives even less developed, the
country took action.  In the years since, saturated fats -- which are
tasty, stable, and solid at room temperature (a characteristic that
makes them valuable for food processing) -- have been replaced with the
only alternative that served the same function.  You may have heard of
it, since it's been in the news lately: trans-fat.  This big change in
the way we ate came to us thanks to food police and their favorite
weapon, the precautionary principle.

The principle, sometimes benignly known as "better safe than sorry,"
states that "when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or
the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some
cause and effect relationships are not fully established
scientifically."  An unstated corollary is "Precaution should be taken
regardless of the risk of any precautionary action."  That is, trying
too hard to err on the safe side can lead to doing something less
safe.  This explains why Michael Crichton wrote in State of Fear: "The
'precautionary principle,' properly applied, forbids the precautionary
principle.  It is self-contradictory."

As a result of the campaign against saturated fats, manufacturers
switched to trans-fats, and those of us who wanted to be healthier
switched from butter to margarine.  Yet now, with only the weakest
case against trans-fats, it too is put on the no-no list.  In fact,
the chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of
Public Health, Dr. Walter Willet (who, in an unfortunate irony, holds a
professorship named after ACSH co-founder  Dr. Fredrick Stare), told
the New York Times, "When I was a physician in the 1980s, that's what I
was telling people to do [switch from saturated fats to trans-fats],
and unfortunately we were often sending them to their graves
prematurely."

This is a result of rushing to lower a perceived threat before
accurately gauging the effects of such a change.  In this case, people
rushed to replace saturated fat with trans-fat, before we really
understood what effects such a substitution might have.  All those
consumers who made the switch and sacrificed butter for margarine are
now being told that the effort may have done more harm than good.

In reality, they probably did no harm, but they did no good, despite
their best intentions.  They would have been better off listening to
more scientifically well-established health advice, like that found in
ACSH's New Year's Resolutions.  (But at least when these people had
their lives altered by the precautionary principle, they were only
mildly affected.  Not everyone is so lucky.  Witness the millions of
victims of malaria since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring inspired
governments to ban DDT "just in case".)

In spite of doomsayers' warnings, there's no substantial body of
evidence that trans-fats have killed anyone.  In fact, for multiple
and complex reasons, over the period when trans-fats came into common
use, rates of deaths from heart disease have actually dropped.  The
evidence on trans-fats doesn't seem to justify the rush to purge every
ounce of it at any cost.  Once again, those who applied the
precautionary principle by telling us to eat margarine instead of
butter -- "just to be safe" --might now be sorry.

Jeff Stier, Esq., is an associate director of the American Council on
Science and Health.

This information was found online at:
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.504/news_detail.asp