Features

Washington’s Long War on Syria
Stephen Gowans
Montreal: Baraka Books, 2017
Pp. 278

Combining analysis, polemics and hard facts, Stephen Gowans looks at the war in Syria from an angle not usually presented in the media. Rather than framing it as a popular struggle for democracy against a brutal dictatorship, he identifies it as a conflict rooted in US imperialism’s drive to eliminate all obstacles to its profit-seeking political and economic control.

“The thesis of this book is that Wall Street’s war on Syria was motivated by the same aim [as the war on Iraq]: the de-Baathification of Syria and the elimination of secular Arab nationalist influence from the Syria state, as a means of expunging the Arab nationalist threat to US hegemony…” (p. 21)

Gowans argues convincingly for this thesis by contrasting the contradictory orientations of the US and Syrian state systems. He amasses much evidence showing that US policy, whether domestic or foreign, reflects the interests of the wealthy few rather than the majority of citizens: “Corporate America has the wherewithal to dominate policy formation in Washington, and uses its vast resources to do so. Consequently, US foreign policy reflects a Wall Street agenda.” (p. 209) 

This is not just a behind-the-scenes reality. The 2006 National Security Strategy openly stated: “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary… when our livelihoods are at stake”, and Defence Secretary Robert Gates elaborated by saying that the US had a “national interest in… unimpeded economic development and commerce”. (p. 208)

Accordingly, the motivation for seeking regime change in Syria had nothing to do with democracy, especially considering that the majority of US allies in the region are far from democratic. Rather, Arab nationalist, Baathist Syria was targeted for its aspirations of Arab unity which could pool the oil and other resources of the region. Equally, Syria was targeted for its opposition to foreign domination and its state-directed economic development, including protection of local industries. 

“Needless to say, the Baathists’ programme was the very antithesis of the model the United States favoured… one of a US-superintended global economy based on free trade, free enterprise, and open markets, overlaid with US political leadership and military domination. It would be naïve to think that Washington was prepared to tolerate an ideology which challenged this paradigm so fundamentally, especially in a region teeming with oil.” (p. 43)

Added to this was the Syrian regime’s alliance with Iran, its opposition to Israeli occupation and expansionism, and its support to Palestinian resistance organisations. While one might object that the regime merely paid lip-service to some of these goals, Gowans assures that US strategists took them seriously.

As early as 1957, the US and Britain charged the CIA’s Middle East chief, Kermit Roosevelt (mastermind of the 1953 coup against Mossadegh who had nationalised Iran’s oil), with assassinating leading figures in the Syrian regime and fomenting an internal uprising with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood. They feared that “Syria’s Baathist-Communist alliance would encourage Mossadegh-like policies throughout the Middle East, and foster popularly-led regime change which would produce pro-independence policies”. (p. 90)

This plan was never carried out as Jordan and Iraq failed to support it, but some of its features reappeared in the 2011 uprising. Evidence exists that the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent campaign against the Syrian regime starting in the 1970s was receiving Western support by the 1980s, and the Bush administration began working with the Brotherhood to topple the regime in 2005, if not earlier. This paved the way for the current CIA programme which by 2015 had trained and equipped nearly 10,000 anti-regime fighters.

The book demolishes a whole slew of myths that have been promoted by the US and other Western governments and media to justify the war on Syria. Chief among them are that the armed opposition was originally democratic and secular, that Bashar Assad’s regime was deeply unpopular, and that it was sectarian, thus pitting “the dominant Alawite minority against the Sunni majority” with little attention paid to the loyalties of other denominations, such as Christians or Druze. “Painting the conflict as a sectarian one also obfuscated the role played by Washington in using mujahedeen as a proxy force to wage war on the Arab nationalists.” (p. 186) 

A whole chapter is devoted to countering the myth of the moderate rebel. Another chapter unmasks media bias and Western hypocrisy, with Gowan noting, “We heard endlessly about the use of lethal force to quell internal disturbances in Libya and Syria, and less about the use of the armed power of the state to suppress uprisings in the Arab Gulf kingdoms.” (p. 169) 

All in all, this is a fascinating account from a little-aired perspective. Gowan adds depth to his analysis of the workings of imperialism by comparing the Syrian war to what has happened in other countries. While the comparisons to Iraq and Libya are obvious, there are other unexpected international historical references and comparisons to the Russian Revolution, aspects of World Wars I and II, and more. “Washington’s Long War on Syria” is a good example of how historical knowledge can contribute to a better understanding of the present.

Bullying can affect the physical and emotional health of your child, both in the short term and later in life. Since there is no school in Jordan that is immune to the problem of bullying, we invited Kings Academy Dean of Middle School Reem Abu Rahmeh and Wellness and Advising Director, Nada Dakhil, to speak to parents at Ask Our Experts II*.

People tend to confuse normal peer conflict with bullying, so defining bullying is essential. Bullying entails three key elements, advise Abu Rahmeh and Dakhil:

• An intent to harm

• A power imbalance

• Repeated acts or threats of aggressive behaviour

Bullying 

prevention skills

Abu Rahmeh and Dakhil highlight all that can be done to circumvent bullying: 

• Helping children and teens learn how to express themselves and be heard 

• Nurturing communication so that children feel comfortable connecting with at least one adult

• Talking about values

• Equipping children and teens with the tools to ask for help

• Teaching assertiveness: eye contact, how to carry themselves — your child’s body language affects how others see and interact with them

• Role playing: “We can’t tell children to stand up for themselves. We have to demonstrate it to them,” says Abu Rahmeh

• Equipping kids with conflict resolution tools

Bystander versus upstander

A bystander is someone who witnesses bullying but does not get involved. An upstander knows that what is happening is wrong and does something to help. Abu Rahmeh and Dakhil work on teaching students how to advocate for their friends and how to report bullying when they see it.

Dakhil noted that her school has a peer counselling programme where students are trained as peer counsellors to support other students. This helps report and reduce bullying. And since victims of bullying tend to have fewer friends, Dakhil encourages parents to arrange playdates, teachers to foster friendships behind-the-scenes and students to reach out to people who seem lonely.

School policy

Every school should have a bullying policy in place since every school is affected, says Abu Rahmeh. “We can say we don’t have tolerance for bullying, regardless of who the child is. Our school is clear on this – it doesn’t matter who you are. If you are bullying, there are learning opportunities and there are consequences,” she adds. 

Dakhil stresses that reporting is not just for the victim: “it’s important for the culture of the school and for the bully too”, she says, noting that reporting “prevents escalation of the problem”. She notes that bullies tend to get vilified as the enemy, but it’s also important for schools to help the bully with emotional and social skills. “A child’s behaviour tends to be a reflection of something happening in their life — a risk factor, a life event.” This is when a school may get involved, conveying feedback to parents when we know what’s impacting the child.”

Takeaway message 

for parents

Dakhil suggests tackling “any topic that’s heavy or raises anxiety and fears from a growth mind-set. This means approaching every situation, every conflict, as a growth opportunity for individuals and communities.” Abu Rahmeh says we think too much about children’s physical health and academic achievements, stressing that mental and emotional health is really important. “We need to think about wellbeing not just when a child is sick or failing in school but as a tool kit they need to be emotionally and mentally healthy,” she concludes.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

TAMPA — Highways are being paved, oil is being drilled and entire cities are sprouting up inside many of the world’s nature preserves, imperilling the very creatures they are meant to protect, researchers said on Thursday.

The vast harm being wreaked by people inside protected areas that are home to endangered animals like the eastern black rhinoceros, Sumatran tiger and spectacled hare-wallaby was detailed in the journal Science.

One third of the world’s protected areas are under “intense human pressure”, warned the report.

Furthermore, some 6 million sq.km of protected land — equivalent to two-thirds the size of China — are unlikely to conserve endangered biodiversity.

“Only 10 per cent of lands were completely free of human activity, but most of these regions are in remote areas of high-latitude nations, such as Russia and Canada,” it said.

The problem is most acute in Asia, Europe and Africa, study co-author James Watson, director of the science and research initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told AFP.

“Most nations are doing the first step, and gazetting protected areas but not doing the harder, and more important, second step of funding the management of those protected areas and ensuring they were secured against large-scale human interference,” he said.

Protected areas are seen as a critical solution to the biodiversity crisis facing the planet, by allowing safe havens for birds, mammals, and marine life to thrive.

The amount of lands set aside globally as protected areas has doubled since 1992.

“We know that when they are well managed, well financed and well placed, they work,” Watson said.

Six-lane highway?

But researchers found disturbing examples of large-scale human infrastructure being built inside nature preserves.

For example, railways run through Tsavo East and Tsavo West national parks in Kenya, home to the endangered eastern black rhinoceros and lion populations famous for their strange lack of manes, Watson said.

“Plans to add a six-lane highway alongside the railway are well underway,” he said.

Barrow Island National Park in Western Australia — home to endangered mammal species such as the spectacled hare-wallaby, burrowing bettong, golden bandicoot and black-flanked rock-wallaby — also house major oil and gas extraction activities.

In the Indonesian island of Sumatra, more than 100,000 people have illegally settled in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park — home to the critically endangered Sumatran tiger, orangutan and rhinoceros — and converted around 15 per cent of the park area for coffee plantations.

US national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone also suffer due to “the increasingly sophisticated tourism infrastructure being built inside their borders”, he said.

“We found major road infrastructure such as highways, industrial agriculture, and even entire cities occurring inside the boundaries of places supposed to be set aside for nature conservation,” said co-author Kendall Jones, a researcher at Queensland University in Australia.

“More than 90 per cent of protected areas, such as national parks and nature reserves, showed some signs of damaging human activities.”

Researchers said solutions include making sure governments set aside the funds to manage preserves strictly for biodiversity.

Some of the success stories in this realm include Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia, Madidi National Park in Bolivia, and Yasuni Biosphere Reserve in Ecuador, Watson said.

Don’t wait for the beep: Voicemail is going the way of the dinosaurs.

Although phone-message technology advanced steadily from cassette recorders attached to landlines to services offered by phone companies to cloud-based message storage for mobile devices, it’s now running up against a changing society that places increasing value on saving every possible moment of time.

With the prevalence of mobile phones, texting, chat apps and e-mail, voicemail just is not as what it used to be.

“Let’s say I get a phone call from my brother,” said Nora Lara, a 50-year-old employee at Santa Clara County Superior Court, who is no fan of voicemail and prefers texting to talking on the phone. “I’ll ignore it. And then he’ll text me. When people leave me voice messages, I just delete them without even checking. If they want to get hold of me, they can text me.”

Roman Basinschi, a 26-year-old software engineer, never uses voicemail. “I don’t think it’s even set up,” he said. Occasionally he’ll leave a voicemail — but only for older people and only in more formal situations.

Lara and Basinchi illustrate a profound and widespread change, one that is re-shaping personal and professional communications and creating a whole new set of rules for how to connect. Voicemail is now seen viewed as inefficient. And for many, that feeling extends to phone conversations in general. These days, a phone call often requires advance scheduling.

The frantic pace of life and work is pushing out phone-based voice communication in favour of text, chat, email and other options seen as more efficient, said Mary Jane Copps, a Canada-based phone-communication consultant known as “The Phone Lady” who gives workshops and consultations across North America.

“We’re all feeling more and more overwhelmed,” Copps said. “We all have less time.”

Businesses began adapting in the past few years to the trend away from voicemail, according to Naomi Baron, an American University linguist who studies language and technology.

In 2014, Coca-Cola scrapped voicemail for employees in a move designed to increase productivity. JPMorgan Chase followed suit in 2015, stripping the service from its consumer-bank workers. Baron said her own university two years ago stopped automatically providing employees with voicemail, and made it an opt-in service.

“There is a death knell being sounded for voicemail in business,” said Baron.

If you are looking to point a finger at those responsible for the looming demise of voicemail, and the change ways we use our phones, Millennials are an appropriate target, experts said. That is because they cut their communications teeth on text messaging and e-mailing, Baron said.

“This is a large generalisation, but they don’t feel that comfortable in face-to-face spoken interaction or its derivative over the phone,” Baron said. “They haven’t had the practice. You have far greater control when you can type something out… and then read it again before you send it, and then edit if you choose to.”

Copps sees people under 40 or so as the leaders in the movement against voicemail. Leaving messages for them is usually a waste of time, she said. “They’ve stopped listening to voicemail, so if your phone number shows up on their phone and they recognise your number they’ll call you back, but they won’t listen to your message,” Copps said.

Advertising account manager Tiffany Sung, 24, said she used to talk on the phone a fair amount, but that was back when it cost a dime to send a text. “When texting became unlimited, I stopped making phone calls as much,” said Sung, who typically does not leave voicemails and rarely listens to them except those from her doctor’s office.

Not only is texting usually faster, “You can do it wherever, whenever,” said Cici Tong, 26, an accountant from San Jose.

With people moving away from voicemails and phone calls, we face a whole new series of decisions about how to get in touch with someone, said Anne Ricketts, a communications coach and founder of LIghthouse Communications in San Francisco. It all depends on whom you’re trying to reach, she said.

Among younger adults, a phone call can come as an unwelcome surprise. “lf you don’t schedule it beforehand… people think it’s an emergency, their heart rate goes up,” Ricketts said.

“If it’s more of a formal relationship, I don’t think you text — you e-mail,” Ricketts said. “If it’s a colleague I was comfortable with, I’d just shoot them a text, but I wouldn’t do that with someone I didn’t know very well.”

For matters too complicated to sort out effectively via e-mail or text, a phone call may be required. But that call is best arranged in advance — via e-mail, text or an app, Ricketts said. That is because voicemail will most likely go unheard.

“In the last three to five years the majority of phone calls in my world are booked ahead of time, just like a meeting,” Copps said, noting that a host of apps are now available to make scheduling calls even easier.

But not every social revolution results in positive change.

“I’m not sure we’re moving toward more efficiency,” Copps said. “We’ve been seduced by text communication. It makes us feel more efficient because we can finish our part of the conversation. We’ve developed a discomfort with conversation.”

In many cases, especially when making logistical plans, text-based communication can actually steal far more time from participants than a quick phone call would, Copps said.

It is also lot harder to convey and understand emotion and nuance in written language than through spoken words, Copps added. “If I send a client a proposal and they email me back and they say, ‘No,’ or ‘not right now’… are they saying, “No, we don’t have the budget,’ or, ‘No, but in three weeks we’ll be ready?’ You need tone of voice.”

If you are going to leave a voicemail, it’s important to hedge your bets, Baron said. She suggests that if you leave one, you should also send a text or email to make sure your message gets through.

PARIS — Messing with the natural rhythm of one’s internal clock may boost the risk of developing mood problems ranging from garden-variety loneliness to severe depression and bipolar disorder, researchers said on Wednesday.

The largest study of its kind, involving more than 91,000 people, also linked interference with the body’s “circadian rhythm” to a decline in cognitive functions such as memory and attention span. 

The brain’s hard-wired circadian timekeeper governs day-night cycles, influencing sleep patterns, the release of hormones and even body temperature.

Earlier research had suggested that disrupting these rhythms can adversely affect mental health, but was inconclusive: most data was self-reported, participant groups were small and potentially data-skewing factors were not ruled out. 

For the new study, an international team led by University of Glasgow psychologist Laura Lyall analysed data — taken from the UK Biobank, one of the most complete long-term health surveys ever done — on 91,105 people aged 37 to 73.

The volunteers wore accelerometers that measured patterns of rest and activity and had this record compared to their mental history, also taken from the UK Biobank.

Individuals with a history of disrupting their body’s natural rhythm — working night shifts, for example, or suffering repeated jetlag — also tended to have a higher lifetime risk of mood disorders, feelings of unhappiness, and cognitive problems, the researchers found.

‘Owls’ and ‘Larks’

The results held true even when the potential impact of factors such as old age, unhealthy lifestyle, obesity and childhood trauma were taken into account, they reported in The Lancet Psychiatry, a medical journal.

The study cannot say conclusively that body clock disturbances are what caused the mental risk, instead of the other way round. 

But the findings “reinforce the idea that mood disorders are associated with disturbed circadian rhythms”, said Lyall.

Measurements of people’s rest-work cycles could be a useful tool for flagging and treating people at risk of major depression or bipolar disorders, the researchers concluded.

One limitation of the study was the average age of the trial participants — 62.

“Seventy-five per cent of [mental] disorders start before the age of 24 years,” said University of Oxford researcher Aiden Doherty, commenting on the paper.

“The circadian system undergoes developmental changes during adolescence, which is also a common time for the onset of mood disorders,” he added.

Humans have been shown to be either “owls” or “larks”, corresponding to so-called genetic “chronotypes” that determine whether we function better at night or during the day. 

Last year, the Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to three US scientists who pioneered our understanding of how the circadian clock ticks.

Alexa, hold your horses.

Amazon Dot Echo Kids Edition started shipping this week, but children’s advocates and others are asking parents to hold off on buying the $79 version of the company’s market-leading smart home speaker. Like the Echo, the Dot Echo Kids Edition is voice-activated and powered by Alexa, the Amazon virtual assistant at the beck and call of millions of Echo users. Some uses: Kids can ask the devices to play music for them, and parents can use the devices as intercoms to call the kids for dinner.

But some groups are worried about how the brightly coloured devices — which come with a subscription for access to FreeTime, whose offerings include children’s content such as books (Alexa can read to them) and apps — will affect children’s well-being and privacy.

“Amazon wants kids to be dependent on its data-gathering device from the moment they wake up until they go to bed at night,” said Josh Golin, executive director for Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), in a statement on Friday.

“Echo Dot Kids is designed to encourage children to give up their personal information so it can drive even more revenues for the e-commerce colossus,” said Jeff Chester, executive director for the Centre for Digital Democracy, in a statement.

Lawmakers also sent a letter to Amazon echoing similar concerns. Senator Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, and Republican. Joe Barton, R-Texas, addressed questions to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and asked for a response by June 1.

An Amazon spokeswoman said on Friday the company has received the legislators’ letter and will address each of their questions — some of which she answered in an email to this news organisation.

For example, Markey and Barton asked whether the Echo Dot Kids Edition records children and whether parents can delete those recordings.

Yes and yes.

“Parents can access all their children’s voice recordings in the Alexa app, and delete them individually or all at once, which also deletes them from the Amazon server,” the Amazon spokeswoman said.

She also addressed the congressmen’s and child advocacy groups’ concerns about marketing to kids: “FreeTime on Alexa voice recordings are only used for delivering and improving the Alexa voice service and FreeTime service — they are not used for advertising or Amazon.com product recommendations.”

Amazon said the Echo Dot Kids Edition and FreeTime service comply with COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Amazon’s privacy policies about its Alexa and its Alexa-powered devices can be found here.

Amid widespread concerns about tech addiction, some experts voiced questions about child-development issues.

“I worry about the unintended consequences of the world of an always-on, artificial device being marketed specifically for parents to ensconce their child within,” said Dipesh Navsaria, a paediatrician who’s a board member at CCFC.

Amazon said the Echo Dot Kids Edition can only be activated with the “wake” word, and has a mute button that disconnects the microphone: “This is by hardware design: no power equals no audio in.”

Schoolbag use does not appear to increase the risk of back pain in children and adolescents, according to an Australian review of previous studies.

Guidelines published by different organisations recommend limits on backpack weight for children, ranging from 5 per cent to 20 per cent of their body weight. However, there have been no reviews summarising the scientific literature, say the authors.

“According to popular opinion, schoolbags are a problem for kids. Many parents and even health professionals believe that schoolbags can be harmful for children, being the cause of their back pain,” study leader Tie Parma Yamato of the University of Sydney in New South Wales told Reuters Health in an e-mail. 

The main factors said to cause back pain in kids are the weight of the schoolbag, the way kids wear them and the design of the bag, but the lack of review evidence is concerning, said Parma Yamato. 

“Because of this, we decided to investigate the research in this area to better understand the relationship between schoolbags and back pain,” she said.

As reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Parma Yamato and colleagues reviewed 69 studies related to schoolbag use and back pain. The studies involved a total of more than 72,000 children.

Five of the studies looked at schoolbag use and the development of back pain over time. One of the studies reported that children who said they have difficulty carrying their schoolbags had a higher risk of persistent back pain and another found that the perceived weight of schoolbags was associated with high back pain risk.

However, when the investigators reviewed the studies, they did not find evidence that schoolbag characteristics such as weight, design and carriage method increased the risk of developing back pain in children and adolescents.

Evidence from the other 64 studies, which did not follow kids over time, did not show any consistent pattern of association between schoolbag use and back pain.

The analysis has some limitations given that so few studies followed the children over time, and those that did were at moderate to high risk of bias.

Still, the take-home message for parents is that they should not be overly worried about schoolbags as a cause of back pain for their children, said Parma Yamato.

“People mistakenly think back pain in kids is an injury and so look for a cause of the back injury and the schoolbag is an easy target to lay blame at,” she said.

In fact, she said, “Physical activity and load are actually good for the spine, so we want kids to be physically active and to carry loads.”

People still believe in the outdated view that poor posture causes back pain and so when they see a child carrying a backpack on one shoulder they mistakenly think the posture adopted will harm them, said Parma Yamato. 

“If a child is experiencing an episode of back pain it may make sense to temporarily reduce the load if this relieves the pain, but once they recover it is fine to return to a normal load in the schoolbag,” she said. 

In an effort to save half a million lives each year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) on Monday urged developing nations to follow the lead of affluent countries and eliminate man-made trans fatty acids from their food supplies.

By taking six specific steps, officials from the United Nations’ health agency said countries could reduce a tidal wave of heart disease and strokes that results in more than 500,000 deaths annually.

“Trans fat is an unnecessary toxic chemical that kills, and there’s no reason people around the world should continue to be exposed” to it, said Tom Frieden, the former director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention who now leads an initiative called Resolve to Save Lives.

For the WHO to throw its weight behind a worldwide trans fat ban “is very helpful”, and countries that follow its advice will see a substantial payoff in improved public health, said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University.

“The cost of transitioning to healthier fats is very small and the cost of treating cardiovascular disease is very high,” said Willett, who was among the first researchers to call out trans fats’ dangers and led the effort to ban them.

Some trans fats occur naturally in dairy foods and meat from ruminant animals. These do not raise major health concerns.

Industrially produced trans fats, on the other hand, have helped fuel an epidemic of cardiovascular disease since they were broadly introduced to the food supply in the 1950s.

These fats are made by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil, converting liquid fats to a solid at room temperature. These “partially hydrogenated” oils made processed foods cheaper to produce while extending their shelf life, and they quickly became an ingredient in bakery and snack foods devoured across the world.

By the mid-1990s, scientists began to turn up evidence that consuming trans fatty acids throws blood cholesterol out of whack, raising levels of LDL (the bad kind) and reducing levels of HDL (the good kind). Once public health researchers linked the growing use of industrial trans fats to rising US rates of heart disease, they spearheaded an effort to expunge the fats from the American diet.

By next month, food manufacturers supplying US consumers are expected to have reformulated their products to drive down trans fats to negligible levels. That process has taken five years, and has met with only muted resistance from large food manufacturers.

The US Food and Drug Administration has estimated that reducing trans fat in the US diet could prevent as many as 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year. That is in line with studies that measured the impact of trans fat limits in Denmark and the United States. A 2016 study of New York City’s ban found that restricting the industrially produced fats drove down cardiovascular deaths by 4.5 per cent and produced annual savings of $3.9 million per 100,000 people.

But as wealthy countries have acted to expunge trans fats from their citizens’ diets, the ill effects have shifted to countries that relied heavily on trans fats to deliver inexpensive processed foods to their growing middle classes.

The WHO initiative launched on Monday, dubbed Replace, outlines a sequence of actions that countries should take to reduce trans fatty acids in their food supplies. It calls on governments to work with legislatures, nongovernmental organisations, oil and food manufacturers, and their citizens to enact measures that mandate the replacement of industrially produced trans fats with healthier fats and oils.

New York University food scientist Marion Nestle praised the initiative as one that will help consumers make healthier decisions without taxing their willpower.

“It’s a change in the food environment that’s likely to have a significant impact on public health and does not require significant behaviour change,” Nestle said. “That is what you want, because behaviour change is difficult.”

The fact that developed countries have been able to reduce trans fat shows that it is technically and politically possible, added William J. McCarthy, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fielding School of Public Health.

“The problem in poorer countries is that there isn’t as much surveillance and government oversight of the food supply, and in their absence you find the small-time vendors much prefer the use of these particular hydrogenated fats,” McCarthy said. “The profit motive is going to favour their use until there’s enough political will to intervene. Just as with control of tobacco products, it takes money, resources and political will to enforce regulations that a lot of food vendors would prefer not to have.”

The WHO has held up two countries — Iran and South Africa — as models for other low- and middle-income nations to follow.

In 2008, South Africa became the first developing country to enact legislation against trans fatty acids, setting a limit on the trans fat content of oils and fats for human consumption of 2 grams per 100 grammes. Experts said it worked because it did not target big food companies, but the manufacturers of industrial fats, a consolidated industry with few players.

Another success story is Iran, a country with the highest recorded intake of trans fats in the world.

Starting in 2005, Iran’s government collaborated with oil manufacturers, oil importers and nongovernmental organisations to reduce trans fats. The government first mandated that the cap on trans fats in corn oil, palm oil, frying oil and mixed liquid oils be cut in half, from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. In 2011, the government continued reducing allowable trans fat content, and has now met its 2018 goal of no more than 1 per cent trans fat content in those oils.

Reducing trans fat in bakery products, still allowed at 5 per cent, remains a challenge for the country to tackle.