Will Hinton notes that New York City has banned use of food products containing trans-fatty acids in New York.
I actually know a good bit about this as I used to make a great study of fats and heart disease. There is some reason, for example, to doubt that cholesterol is really all it's cracked up to be in heart disease. Also there's lots of reasons to believe that the demonization of fats in general (popular in the 1990s) was way off-base. Then the demonization of fats turned mostly to saturated fats. Which is also starting to look off-base.
What's left appears to be trans-fats, and what studies I've seen (it's been a few years, but peer reviewed studies typically take a few years to percolate up to public attention anyway if they're any good) was that, regardless of its impact on cholesterol in general, trans-fatty acids looked to be directly associated with heart disease and other problems to a level that neither saturated nor unsaturated fats really were.
A quick lesson:
Fat is a complex molecule made up mostly of hydrogen and carbon. The hydrogen tends to be on the "outside" of the molecule, wrapping around the carbon atoms on the "inside" of the molecule. Think of it sort of like a burrito, with a hydrogen tortilla wrapped around a carbon filling. (Yes I'm oversimplifying, and any of you chemistry buffs who try to pedantically "correct" my simple analogy will promptly receive a virtual wedgy. You've been warned.)
An "unsaturated" fat basically has lots of holes in the hydrogen burrito wrapping. There's spots on the molecular chain where lots more hydrogen would fit, but it's not there. Think of it like holes in the tortilla.
Unsaturated fats are very common in fish oils and vegetable oils. They tend to be pale yellowish or white or clear, and to be liquid at room temperature, and to go rancid fairly quickly, especially if exposed to light and heat.
In a saturated fat, all or most of the "holes" in the hydrogen tortilla wrapping are filled with hydrogen. Thus it is more "saturated" with hydrogen. The more saturated a fat gets, the whiter it tends to get, and the more solid it tends to be at room temperature. Butter is mostly made up of highly saturated fats, and is goopy but semi-solid at room temperature. Some butters are a little more saturated than others, and are thus a little more solid at room temp than others.
A truly highly saturated fat, like beef or pork fat, can be pretty solid even at room temperature. Saturated fats tend to go rancid slowly--you can leave bacon grease or butter sitting out on your counter for days or even weeks at a time and keep using it just fine.
Polyunsaturated and monosaturated fats are basically unsaturated fats by the way. Monosaturates are a little more hydrogen-filled and thus keep better than polyunsaturates. Olive oil is a monosaturated fat--it tends to keep longer and go rancid less quickly than most vegetable oils for this exactly reason. This is also why most people find it a little taster.
Oh, and by the way, in case you never realized it: yes, vegetable oil, fish oil, bacon grease, butter, and similar products are basically all nothing but fat. If you look at a tablespoon of olive oil you're looking at, chemically, a tablespoon of fat with only a tiny smidge of other things in it giving it a little color and flavor. If you're looking at a stick of butter you're looking at a stick of solid fat with a tiny smidge of flavor agents and a tiny amount of protein and carbohydrate.
When you're using these ingredients in your cooking, you're adding fat. It's what you're doing. These products do not "contain fat," they basically are fat. When you smear butter on your bread you're basically saying, "this would taste better with some fat on it." (Ditto if you substitute olive oil, shmaltz, or even mayonnaise. These are all products made of almost nothing but fat with a little flavoring.)
Saturated fat is more expensive than unsaturated fat. It comes mostly from meat and dairy products). It's also better to cook with, especially to fry with. And, it keeps longer in the fridge or even on the counter.
OOOOOKay, so, now, what the heck is a trans-fat? Actually it's really simple when you get all of the above:
Take some cheap vegetable oil, and whip it heavily with hydrogen. The little holes in the hydrogen tortilla wrapping of the fat molecules start to fill up. It begins to whiten up, to harden... and to take on the characteristics of an animal fat. Of a saturated fat.
It was first made popular in a product known as Crisco. Which is basically cheap cottonseed oil whipped with hydrogen until it takes on the physical qualities of butter.
Most forms of margarine are the same way: take some cheap vegetable oil, whip in a bunch of hydrogen and some yellow eye to make it look like butter, and voila, a product that looks like butter.
This is what is known as "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" oil.
So what's the big deal? Well, fat molecules come in many different shapes and lengths. An unsaturated vegetable oil whipped with hydrogen does not result in a molecule that looks like pork fat or butterfat. It's its own unique molecule, quite unlike anything found in nature. And many of those molecules are better known as trans-fatty acids.
Small amounts of trans-fats exist in nature, but really only in tiny quantities. When you're eating partially hydrogenated oils, however, you're eating great huge quantities of it. Far more than any of our ancestors ever would have.
You're basically eating a chemical additive which was never really tested before being released into the general population.
Got a jar of Crisco anywhere in your house? It's nothing but a chemistry experiment from the early 20th century. It's a jar full of trans-fat.
How did it get past FDA approval? Well, it was available before there was any FDA, for one thing. Besides, who'd think whipping air into vegetable oil would make something unhealthy?
It's increasingly looking like most of the health warnings we had about fats in the 1990s, and the shift to saturated fats later on, was off-base. In fact, we know now that low-fat, low-cholesterol diets are generally ineffective. And perhaps the reason was that we all along thought fat was the enemy rather than one specific type of very artificial and unnatural fat, which even in small quantities looks to be pretty bad for you.
And until very recently, partially hydrogenated oils were in almost EVERY manufactured food. Breads, cereals, chips, margarines, sandwich spreads, salad dressings, and more. To give on an idea why:
If you've ever made your own potato chips at home, you've probably noticed that when you fry the chips in vegetable oil, they come out kind of greasy and oily. That's because if you made it in vegetable oil, the remaining oil was still liquidy and tended to seep slowly out of the chips.
If you made them with animal fat--beef or pork fat, say--once they cooled they didn't drip at all. Why? Beef and pork fat is pretty solid at room temperature, and doesn't tend to rub off on your fingers so much.
Animal fat costs a lot more than vegetable fat. So what did manufacturers do? Used cheap hydrogenated oil of course!
And by the way, does that mean those companies were evil? I sure don't think so. Gee, you've got a nice cheap product that results in a pleasing potato chip. Using a product that's been around for decades that no one ever suspected was unhealthy. Why not? It's just Crisco for goodness sakes!!
I'm not looking forward to the lawsuits here--I don't think many companies deserve to be kicked around for using what they honestly thought was a good and reliable and cost-effective product. But I do think this is a very good example of where sensible government intervention is a good thing. There are many perfectly acceptable alternatives to partially hydrogenated oils now, that result in more molecularly natural foods. Food vendors should be pushed into using alternatives.
And if the pro-Crisco lobby wants to lobby for "freedom of trans-fat choice!" then more power to 'em. Just get the stuff out of products that I might unsuspectingly buy on the streets, or that poor people might wind up eating just because they don't know better and/or they have no alternatives.
