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Speaker 1: One of the things you want to avoid in your

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Speaker 1: diet is trans fats. Six hundred and forty five thousand

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Speaker 1: people die globally each year because of a high TFA diet,

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Speaker 1: and trouble is, a lot of the foods don't disclose them, so,

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Speaker 1: in other words, you don't even know they're in the

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Speaker 1: University of Auckland Population Health Senior research fellow doctor Catherine

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Speaker 1: Bradbury's with us on this. Catherine, very good morning to you, Marina. Basically,

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Speaker 1: it's biscuits, cakes, commercially cooked and produced stuff, isn't it, broadly?

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Speaker 2: Yes, Yeah, those the types of foods that could have

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Speaker 2: transfat in them.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, if you labeled it. Here's my argument, even if

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Speaker 1: you put that on the back of the packet and

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Speaker 1: said there's transfats in this, I don't know, you wouldn't

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Speaker 1: eat a biscuit.

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Speaker 2: Possibly. But the thing is we just don't know really

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Speaker 2: because we found that only about fifteen percent of package

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Speaker 2: products in our safer markets said whether they had trans

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Speaker 2: fat in them or not. So you know, even if

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Speaker 2: you want to avoid them, you can't.

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Speaker 1: Really when you look at all that labeling, what are

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Speaker 1: they name it airs or do they just not put

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Speaker 1: it in because they don't have to at all.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't have to. So on our food products,

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Speaker 2: we have to say how much energies in them, protein, carbohydrates,

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Speaker 2: total fat, and saturated fat, but you don't have to

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Speaker 2: say how much trans fat isn't there? So that's why

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Speaker 2: they don't normally. And then even in the ingredients list,

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Speaker 2: they can sort of just say things like vegetable oils,

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Speaker 2: and then it's very difficult to know if it's been

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Speaker 2: what we call partially hydrogenated, which means that there would

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Speaker 2: be transfat in it. So yeah, it's just really impossible

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Speaker 2: for someone to tell.

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Speaker 1: Of did that slip through the system Because we've had

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Speaker 1: this labeling argument for ages and there are labels and

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Speaker 1: there's lots of detail on the labels. How come trans

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Speaker 1: fats slip through the net?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's interesting. I mean we have been people

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Speaker 2: have been calling for for a long time to try

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Speaker 2: and tighten up those regulations. There's just sort of it's

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Speaker 2: just with the vegetable oils, they're allowed to just say

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Speaker 2: vegetable oils. They don't have to say the type of

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Speaker 2: oil and things isn't That's what's sort of weakened the

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Speaker 2: regulations at the moment, because that makes.

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Speaker 1: It even more complicated because oils are oil. I mean,

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Speaker 1: you can have some very good oils, but you have

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Speaker 1: some deeply troubling oils.

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Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, And so they they're not at the moment

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Speaker 2: required to say what exactly type of oil it is,

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Speaker 2: so you couldn't tell whether it was palm oil, for example,

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Speaker 2: they could just say vegetable oil, Yeah exactly.

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Speaker 1: Is anyone looking to change any of this or is

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Speaker 1: life got a bit busy and complicated for us to

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Speaker 1: fix any of these problems?

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Speaker 2: Now? No, the Ministry for Primary Industries is actually at

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Speaker 2: the moment trying to determine different kind of options to

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Speaker 2: try and eliminate trans fat from our food supply because

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Speaker 2: of the who becommend that we take certain steps to

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Speaker 2: eliminate these kind of industrially produced transfats from our food suply.

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Speaker 1: Well, let's hope we do something about it. Catherine Precire,

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Speaker 1: doctor Catherine Bradbury out of Auckland University.

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Speaker 2: For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to

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