Hacker News Reader

Comment by purpleidea | Hacker News Reader

As a Canadian, I'm always so surprised how little regard the U.S. has for the safety and health of its own citizens.

Another big surprise is that U.S. manufacturers are allowed to say their products contain "zero trans fat" when in fact the amount can be as high as 0.5g / serving! (Which is an incredibly high amount!)

In Canada the law for trans fats is < 0.1g for example. I guess this is what happens when politicians are influenced by corporations who pay them instead of citizens they are supposed to represent!

View on HN

Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It leads to flamewars, which is what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like we had to ask you this at least once before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735012.

You are allowed to say cooking oil spray is fat free because the 1/3 of a second of spray serving size allows you to round the fat value to zero.

It’s not that simple. While industrial lobbying is real and terrible, it’s also the will of the people at play.

The 19th century frontier “Let Me Do This Myself” culture and the Cold War “Freedom Heck Yeah” culture are real cultural arteries that make many citizens down here earnestly vote against regulations and protections.

There’s plenty of that in Canada too, although it’s shaped differently and has different political influence.

But yeah, for as much as you or I might see a government as a protector of individuals against exploitation by corporations and other mobs, US governments are usually pretty slow and sloppy about it, if they try at all.

0.5g/serving trans fat threshold is even worse when you consider that there is absolutely no regulation for serving sizes. If a company exceeds the limit on trans fat, they don't have to recall the product, they can just decrease the serving size until trans fat falls below 0.5g, then slap "no trans fat" on the front of the container.

Remember that next time you buy cooking oil, and the serving size is 1 teaspoon. It could be as much as 10% trans fat, and they don't have to tell you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com