The Fat Nobody Ordered: Our Push for Uganda’s First Trans Fat Law

It has no nutritional value; it is linked to heart attacks, and Uganda still has no law against it. We intend to change that before the year is out.

Nobody walks into a shop and asks for a side of heart disease. Yet many of us carry it home anyway, folded into the bread, the margarine, the cake and the crisps.

The culprit has a clumsy name: industrially produced trans fatty acids, or iTFAs. They are made in factories by hardening vegetable oil into a cheap, long-lasting fat. They make food last longer on the shelf. And according to the World Health Organization, they are responsible for more than 278,000 deaths around the world every year, mostly from heart attacks.

Here is the part that should make every Ugandan uneasy. iTFAs have no nutritional value at all. Nothing. Nearly 60 countries already protect their people with best-practice laws, either capping iTFAs at 2 grams per 100 grams of total fat or banning the partially hydrogenated oils that produce them. Uganda is not yet one of them.

If a fat does nothing for your body except damage your heart, why is it still legal on our shelves?

We did not want to argue from opinion alone, so we went looking for the evidence. CEFROHT conducted a national study of 1,083 food products to find out how widespread iTFA products are on the Ugandan market. That evidence now sits behind every conversation we have with government.

We also knew a regulation is only as strong as the people who understand it. So we trained 25 media houses to report on iTFAs accurately, and more than 40 lawyers to advocate, enforce and, where necessary, litigate for a healthier food environment.

From the newsroom to the Ministry

Working with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, we have helped finalize a draft hybrid iTFA regulation aligned with WHO best practice. Hybrid means it does both jobs: it sets a strict limit on iTFAs and removes partially hydrogenated oils from the food supply, leaving no loophole for either.

Meanwhile, we kept the issue where it belongs, in the public eye. On UBC, Arise Family TV, Smart FM and other stations, we explained why Uganda must regulate its food environment and why a hybrid iTFA law is the right one. On World Heart Day, our podcast The CEFROHT Cafeteria asked listeners a blunt question: are you eating yourself into heart failure?

We are not interested in another policy that sits in a drawer. We continue to press the Ministry of Health to finalize and pass the regulation, and we are preparing to publish our iTFA and front-of-pack warning label analyses so that every Ugandan can see what the evidence shows.

Some will say the market will sort this out. We disagree. When a product harms people and offers nothing in return, protecting consumers is not overregulation. It is the state doing its job, and the right to health and adequate food demands it.

Help us cross the finish line. Share this story, tune in to The CEFROHT Cafeteria on YouTube at @cefrohtmedia, or partner with us at info@cefroht.org.