This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 19, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The FDA is making it a great deal more difficult for food producers to use trans fats.

That decision implicates the power of governments

to simply regulate products out of existence, the right of Americans to accept risk

in order to get certain benefits, and the inability of manufacturers to use trans fats to extend shelf life and lower prices.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses what this decision means.

A lot of headlines read read FDA bans trans fats. Is that actually what's happened?

It's a little more complicated. They knocked trans fats off the GRAS list, generally

recognized as SIF, which is a list of ingredients that have been used,

conventionally, sugar is on the list, salt is on the list, many others.

It doesn't exactly ban it, but everyone expects that it will amount to a near-bam.

Manufacturers that want to add trans fats are going to have to go through a process that most of them are probably not going to want to tackle.

The interesting issues that were in controversy when they put this over were

would they tolerate low thresholds of using it in

conventional products and that's important in food manufacturing because for

the now famous cupcake sprinkles or for other applications like making crisp frozen pizza

things like that the manufacturers were hoping to have the leeway to at least to add

some for the bits of the product where they

couldn't duplicate the effect.

And that's mostly going to be ruled out apparently.

In terms of compliance, what kind of data do food producers have to come up with?

...