Cheap vegetable oils are made more
solid and spreadable (think: more expensive) by hydrogenation, the industrial
process of adding hydrogen atoms to oil with heat and a catalyst. An added advantage for the junk food
companies is that hydrogenation destroys the delicate essential fatty acids so
that partially hydrogenated vegetable oils have a long shelf life. Check out my overview, and Know
Your Fats by Mary Enig, who has
done more than anyone to expose the dangers of, and misinformation about trans fats.
Hydrogenated fats hit the market with
Crisco in 1911, but really took off during the depression years because of
their price advantage over butter. I
don’t believe it is a coincidence that heart attacks were
established as a leading cause of death by 1930. trans-fats cause an increase in C-reactive protein (a marker
for inflammation),
and elevate lp(a),
two independent risk factors for heart disease.
trans-fats in body fat predict
both heart-attack
and cancer
risk, while their consumption has been linked with diabetes
risk.
trans fats are found in vegetable oils, baked goods and
margarines. Fast food joints fry their
French fries in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Ironically, McDonald’s changed from trans-free beef tallow to partially
hydrogenated soybean oil in 1990, under pressure from the Center for Science in
the Public Interest (apparently a front for soy interests) to remove
saturated fats from their French fries!
The political will to remove trans-fats from the food supply has
taken almost 30 years to harden (heh heh) sufficiently for action to be
taken. The 2002 National Academy of
Sciences report on Dietary
Reference Intakes contained the recommendation that "the maximum safe
intake level … would be zero." As Walter Willett, chairman of the
Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, put it:
"There was a lot of resistance from the scientific community [to acknowledging the dangers of trans fats] because a lot of people had made their careers telling people to eat margarine instead of butter. When I was a physician in the 1980's, that's what I was telling people to do and unfortunately we were often sending them to their graves prematurely."
In January of 2006, food labeling
laws will require disclosure of trans-fat
content, just 28 short years after Mary Enig drew
attention to their association with cancer.
As Winston Churchill put it, “You can always count on Americans to do
the right thing, after they've tried everything else.”