The Bangladesh Food Safety Authority (BFSA) will unveil its draft policy on Monday seeking public opinion before finalising the guideline to regulate the use of industrially-produced trans fat in the food supply.
“We’ll publish the draft on our website tomorrow,” BFSA member Manzur Morshed Ahmed, who heads the technical committee on trans fat, said on Sunday evening.
It will be available on the website for a while. Ahmed said they would sit with the stakeholders during this time and finalise the guideline recommendations.
Health experts say the industrially-produced Trans Fatty Acid (iTFA) are highly harmful for the human body as their excessive intake raises risks of heart attacks and cardiovascular diseases.
In Bangladesh, around 131,000 people die each year from heart diseases, according to government figures. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) attribute at least 5,776 of these deaths to trans fat consumption.
Research and advocacy organisation PROGGA’s Executive Director ABM Zubair blamed the rising number of preventable deaths on the procrastination in formulating the TFA policy.
WHO has set a global target of eliminating iTFA from the food supply chain by 2023. Around 30 countries, including India, have taken steps to determine the maximum limit of trans fat in foods, while another 24 countries are in the process to lower the limit to 2 percent.
A study by the National Heart Foundation Hospital and Research Institute analysed 24 samples of leading partially hydrogenated oils (PHO) or dalda brands from the markets of Dhaka and found TFA contents exceeding the 2 percent threshold recommended by WHO in 92 percent of them.
Analysis of the samples even showed a staggering high concentration of TFA with a maximum 20.9g per 100g, which is 10 times more than the WHO-set threshold.
Public health experts have been calling on the BFSA to set the limit of TFA as soon as possible.
