Just in time for the holidays, Uncle Cecil dishes on trans fats.
Judging from what I’m seeing in blogs and such, people just aren’t getting this trans fat thing, despite the uproar surrounding New York’s recent ban of manufactured trans fats in restaurants. It’s not about Big Brother, you dopes. (“Will they ban sugar and salt next?” Sheesh.) We’re talking about an industrial product used in food preparation because it’s cheap and convenient, not because it makes anything taste better. In the old days, when nobody knew trans fats from transvestites, the stuff seemed harmless.
Now several big studies strongly suggest trans fat is even worse than saturated fat, formerly the hemlock of American cuisine.Let’s take it from the top. Although some trans fat occurs in foods naturally (mostly in animal products), the major source in the U.S. diet is partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Hydrogenation, in which hydrogen gas is forced into oil under pressure, reduces rancidity and makes the otherwise liquid oil semisolid at room temperature, both useful features in products like margarine. Trans fat is created as a side effect of this process. It’s similar to the other two common types of fat, saturated and unsaturated,
except the carbon and hydrogen atoms are put together differently — where unsaturated fat molecules have a pronounced kink in the middle, trans molecules are straighter, more like those of saturated fat.Why should this matter healthwise? Damned if I know (nobody else seems to have much idea either), but it does. One long-term study of more than 80,000 women showed that, compared to carbohydrates, every 5 percent increase in saturated fat consumption resulted in a 17 percent increase in the risk of coronary heart disease, while every 2 percent increase in trans fat resulted in a 93 percent increase. Interestingly, the study found that consuming more non-trans unsaturated fat relative to carbs reduces the
risk of heart disease.
Assuming one trusts Cecil’s stats, it certainly sounds like TFs are seriously bad news. My biggest beef (so to speak) over the current furor on TFs is that I really don’t think it’s something that should be regulated on a city level (way too much slippery slopiness there); the statehouse or the FDA or Congress (not to mention the marketplace) seem more effective and proper places to fight the War on TFs.
Well, the major purveyors of the stuff worked hard to keep the marketplace from doing anything and neither the feds (maybe something will happen when the Dems are in charge; maybe) nor the states are doing much either.
So: cities.
It seems to me that if there’s enough political pressure to get a city to do something about it, that ought to translate upwards — and having cities dictate food additives seems to be an undesirable state.
Alas both you and i fall prey to the gravitational vortex of McDonald’s. Maybe I’ll just have cereal for breakfast.
Breakfast at McDonalds is a rare enough event for me that I don’t feel particularly guilty. 🙂