It’s not often that news out of Spokane becomes a worldwide sensation. The tale of the identity-challenged Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who insists she’s black, created a media firestorm this month.
A woman with a history of grievance, Dolezal was president of Spokane’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People before she was outed as white. She’s also been fired as head of Spokane’s police ombudsman commission for misconduct.
It would be heartening to believe that having white people trying to pass as black means we’ve made social progress. But we clearly haven’t sorted out our race relations, as the outraged reactions to her story indicate. I hold with those who contend that Dolezal appears to have misappropriated a victimized black identity to satisfy her ego needs.
The skinny on trans fats
Thanks to the media frenzy surrounding the unrepentant Dolezal, you may have missed Fred Kummerow’s story. Unlike Dolezal, he’s worthy of your attention.
He’s 100 years old, and for the last 60 years this razor-sharp University of Illinois biochemist has been trying to get artery clogging trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils) out of our mouths and arteries. He finally sued the federal Food and Drug Administration to make that happen. So three years hence, trans fats will vanish from our food supply, though most of it already is gone, thanks to a 2006 federal labeling requirement. There is no level of trans fats that can be safely ingested by humans, the FDA now very tardily admits.
Trans fats have been linked to the deaths of nearly 50,000 people annually, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. But the foot-dragging FDA modestly estimates only 7,000 fewer deaths and 20,000 fewer heart attacks will result from its ban.
The center’s executive director, Michael Jacobson, calls the ban “probably the single most important change in our food supply if not in decades, then ever.” A “Trans Fats Wall of Shame” on the center’s website lists prepared foods producers still using trans fats. Trans fats may yet lurk in doughnuts, popcorn, potato and tortilla chips, french fries, pizza dough, cake frostings, etc.
Were there a Nobel Prize for perseverance, Kummerow would be a laureate. A childhood immigrant from Germany, in the 1950s he unexpectedly discovered trans fats clogging arteries of people who’d died of heart attacks. Alarmed, he began his pioneering research on trans fats. Nobody cared.
In those days, margarine was touted as the healthy choice over butter, but margarine was a significant source of trans fats. Kummerow was “resoundingly criticized and dismissed,” says Dr. Walter Willett, chair of Harvard’s department of nutrition. Kummerow persuaded Willett to include trans fats in Harvard’s decades-long Nurses’ Health Study, and it directly confirmed the dangers of trans fats. That was in, oh … 1993.
Kummerow — who begins each day with eggs scrambled in butter, drinks whole milk, dines on red meat several times a week, and eats fruits, vegetables and whole grains — isn’t finished upending common medical wisdom. Don’t fear LDL, the so-called “bad cholesterol,” he says. Saturated fat in butter, cheese and meat doesn’t clog arteries, he insists.
“Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, except if it’s oxidized,” he told the New York Times. Oxidation, a bodily process involved in aging, also happens when high temperatures are used in commercial frying of unstable polyunsaturated oils, he says. When ingested, those oxidized fatty acids (trans fats) become harmful particles in LDL.
His latest research shows that hardening of the arteries is linked to — are you ready? — soybean, corn and sunflower oils. Oops. Are they today’s margarine?
Waterlogged brains
Finally, a word from California, always in the vanguard shaping our social mores. That state is enduring a drought so severe that even food-producing farmers with senior water rights have had their water allocations cut back; the Central Valley aquifer is being depleted; and water rationing is about to be imposed on urbanites.
The latter does not sit well with some residents in the wealthy San Diego County enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, which uses five times more water per capita than the statewide average. When Gov. Jerry Brown called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe rose 9 percent.
“What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” asked Gay Butler, who told the Washington Post that her water bill already is $800 a month.
Steve Yuhas protested that financially fortunate people like himself “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful.” He added: “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live. And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Say what? “We’re not all equal when it comes to water”? Hello?
In a warming world where NASA has discovered that a third of the world’s major groundwater aquifers are rapidly shrinking due to overuse, such moronic sentiments promise strife without end. If the wealthy really are to have more privileged rights to Earth’s vanishing water supplies than the rest of us, ours is a dystopian future indeed.
Human selfishness has always been the Achilles Heel that’s undermined our species’ efforts to live in civil societies. Our oil wars tell us what’s in store if such myopic, self-centered people get their way with water.
Solveig Torvik lives in Winthrop.
Solveig Torvik lives in Winthrop.
