Education Guidance Its Relation

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Admin
Education Guidance Its Relation

Education Guidance Its Relation

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is an independent UK body whose remit is to produce guidance promoting good health and tackling the issues which contribute to poor health. The information the organisation produces covers everything from gynaecology to injuries and accidents: its most recent guidelines, published on 22 June 2010, address the issues of healthy diet and trans fats in food.

The NICE Guidance on Healthy Eating

The NICE's most recent guidelines tackle the subject of healthy eating and, in particular, the way in which food is produced. They draw heavily on a considerable body of evidence and the ultimate intention is to make improvements to overall health by implementing relatively small changes (“Cut Salt and Saturated Fat Levels in Processed Food to Save Thousands of Lives, says NICE”, niceorg.uk, accessed 23 June 2010).

The press release issued by NICE has been interpreted as an attack upon the ready meals/takeaway sector. Certainly, the key pointers for action are relevant to the production of processed, rather than home cooked, food – namely, targeting the nation’s salt intake, reducing salt intake to a maximum of three grams per day by 2025; reducing saturated fats in all food products; and removing trans fats from processed food and takeaway meals.

NICE claims that small changes can make significant differences in terms of lives saved. In total, for example, it claims that around 40,000 people under the age of 75 might be spared an early death from such ailments as strokes and heart attacks: around half of these deaths, it is claimed, would be saved merely by reducing the levels of saturated fats and eliminating trans fats.

Trans Fats: What They are and Why They are Harmful

Trans fats are a particular type of fat with a double chemical bond. Some occur naturally (for example, in meat and dairy products) but at low levels: most are are created by chemical alteration of vegetable oils through a process called hydrogenation (hydrogenated vegetable oils) during the processing of food. They are commercially attractive to food manufacturers because they create easily usable solid or semi-solid fats which have a longer shelf-life than natural products (British Medical Journal, Removing Industrial Trans Fats From Food, BMJ 2010;340:c1826, bmj.com).

Chemical trans fats are purely a feature of the food processing industry: NHS guidance points out that they have no nutritional value (NHS “What Are Trans fats?” nhs.uk). Indeed, all the evidence points to the fact that they are potentially extremely damaging to health. The BMJ study cited above notes that they are linked to high cholesterol and death from heart disease and strokes.