Why Tax Saturated Fat?

Forget whether Denmark’s tax on saturated fat will actually work or not, the real problem that no one is talking about is how they’re targeting the wrong thing.

The thing is, saturated fat isn’t bad. A recent study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no strong association between dietary saturated fat intake and increased risk of cardiovascular heart disease. Additionally, a study  conducted as part of the Women’s Health Initiative found that reducing total fat intake (while increasing consumption of produce and grain) didn’t significantly reduce heart disease risk. (Still not convinced? Read our special report What If Bad Fat Is Actually Good for You?)

Denmark’s tax, which is said to raise the price of a burger by around $.15 and the price of butter by around $.40, oddly, isn’t focused at combating obesity. (Denmark’s obesity rate is relatively low, about 13 percent, as compared to the United States' 28 percent. Instead, the numbers game is focused on increasing life expectancy—by 3 years over the next decade. That’s an ambitious goal with a flawed method, argues Jeff Volek, Ph.D, associate professor at the University of Connecticut and author of The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living.

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The implementation of the fat tax “assumes saturated fat is a health concern in terms of heart disease,” Volek says. “That evidence is now being scrutinized at a level where if you really look carefully, there’s no good association between saturated fat and foods that contain saturated fat and heart disease.”

Volek isn’t alone in his assertion. He just returned from the 9th Euro Fed Lipid Congress, where he gave a presentation  on the role of saturated fat on cardiovascular risk. “The perspective of the scientists there was all pretty one-sided; they thought this was a bad idea. The science of saturated fat is much less clear cut than what people make it out,” he says. “I think people are looking for ways to generate money by looking at other potentially harmful things and then mistakenly focusing in on saturated fat.”

Here’s where the theory has gone wrong: “People mistakenly assume that if you eat more saturated fats, that translates into more saturated fat in your blood,” Volek says. “What our research is showing that the carbohydrate intake is a much stronger predictor of your saturated fat levels in the blood than is the dietary saturated fat intake.”

While this isn’t Denmark’s first foray into the business of food taxing—they’ve already  banned trans fats and have extra taxes on sugar and soda—the real kicker with the fat tax is that it might actually backfire. Findings from Copenhagen University Hospital found an increased risk of heart disease in people who restricted saturated fat and replaced those calories with carbohydrates. “You could actually have an adverse effect on health. It depends what you replace it with really,” Volek says. “If people replace those calories with carbohydrates, I think you will continue to see escalating rates of obesity and diabetes and metabolic syndrome and some of these other problems that are more tightly link to carbohydrate intake than fat intake.”

“We have a case of not really understanding or paying attention to the science here,” says Volek. “We run the risk of continuing our rates of obesity and diabetes if we don’t refocus our energies away from saturated fat and onto other aspects of the diet.”

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