Originally published July 21 2005
Columnist: Kraft embellished claims of intense toil over trans fat-free Oreo
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
When Gersh Kuntzman challenged Kraft to make an Oreo without trans fat, he almost felt bad about how much time and money they spent doing it, but felt a "gotcha" moment when a reader from Switzerland informed him that Oreos across Europe had been free of the unhealthy oil for a long time.
A few weeks ago, I ran a column about the megacorporation's effort to create an Oreo cookie without trans-fats, those pernicious frankenlipids that not only clog your arteries, but actually help lower your "good" cholesterol at the same time.
Trans-fats like partially hydrogenated soybean oil are so omnipresent in the American diet that even the government eventually noticed it and, starting next year, food producers like Kraft will be forced to reveal on the nutritional label how many grams of trans-fats are in each serving.
As I wrote last month, Kraft chose to meet this new reporting requirement head on: by finally accepting that it had to clean up the poison it was pouring into our bodies.
After my article appeared, a woman named Antoinette Vermilye wrote me from Switzerland and was shocked--shocked!--that a journalist of my food-consuming gifts had bought into Kraft's tale of overworked, but passionate food scientists burning the midnight (and artery-clogging-) oil in their two-year struggle to find an alternative to Frankenfats.
"They certainly didn't need two years to come up with an Oreo without trans-fats," Vermilye told me, "because none of the Oreos we buy here in Europe have trans-fats.
Maybe this wasn't Watergate, but I had caught Kraft in a creamy white lie: It's not difficult at all to get Oreos without partially hydrogenated soybean oil (which was invented 100 years ago as a candle wax but worked so good as a fat substitute that Proctor and Gamble called it Crisco and sold it to housewives).
I immediately called Kraft spokeswoman Elisabeth Wenner, who repeated the same company line about how "adjusting the recipe for original Oreo has been one of the toughest challenges" the company has ever faced.
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