It's a good sign that treats made Grandma's way will eventually rot
- assuming there are any left.

http://www.dragonflymedia.com/sv/2005/sv1802/goodfoodbad1802.html

February 2005 | Whole Health
Good Food Goes Bad
by Alicia Priest

Last November, Canadian parliamentarians vindicated my grandma's
eating habits. At least part way. Like every good Mennonite of her
generation, she spurned store-bought breads, cookies, cakes, and
pastries and insisted on making her own zwieback, pfeffernusse, tortes,
and other delicacies laden with butter, eggs, cream, and milk.
Margarine never touched her lips. Neither did soup-in-a-cup,
chicken-in-a-bucket, fish-in-a-breadstick or that culinary oxymoron,
non-dairy coffee creamer.

Grandma didn't know it, but nearly all commercially prepared foods
contain a man-made poison called trans fatty acids. (Meats and milk
contain trace amounts of trans fats, but the vast majority we consume
are produced by an industrial process.) When MPs ruled last fall that
food manufacturers must list trans-fat content on labels by 2006, they
gave the nod to what some food scientists have been arguing for years:
Trans fats kill. They do so by stiffening and clogging arteries,
thereby raising the risk of heart disease. NDP leader Jack Layton has
urged politicians to go even further and ban processed trans fats
entirely, a move recommended by the World Health Organization but made
by only one country to date-Denmark.

The popularity of trans fats in our diet attests to our fondness for
cheap foods conveniently made by someone else. Soon after World War II,
food manufacturers looked to replace butter with a cheap fat that
wouldn't go rancid after a relatively short period of time. They
discovered hydrogenation, a pro-cess that bubbles hydrogen gas through
liquid vegetable oil, usually canola or soybean, under high pressure at
high temperatures in the presence of a heavy metal such as cadmium. The
metal acts as a catalyst. The result is an artificial substance that
Vancouver registered dietician Karen Mornin describes as "toxic to
our bodies." Trans fats increase shelf life but decrease human life.
Mornin explains, "Trans fats are a double wham-my-they raise LDL,
the bad cholesterol, and lower HDL, the good cholesterol."

In less than 50 years, trans fats have swept throughout the food supply
and now nestle in almost every edible product produced outside the
home, from puddings to peanut butter to Pop Tarts. Today, Canadians
consume an average of 10 grams of trans fat a day. That's the
equivalent of ingesting a medium order of french fries plus a gourmet
cinnamon bun every 24 hours.

Right now the words "trans fats" don't appear on nutrition
labels. Instead they're hidden behind euphemisms such as
hydrogenation, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, or vegetable oil
shortening. While mandatory labeling will help consumers and
manufacturers avoid these harmful fats, Mornin acknowledges that
there's more to it. Perhaps the hardest thing to do is switch from
foods that can sit in a cupboard for two years without aging to foods
that do what biodegradable matter should-degrade.

"You want to eat foods that basically rot," Mornin says. "Because
if they're not going to break down in the environment, they're not
going to break down in your body."

(Anyone looking for a remarkable reminder of this should watch the
special feature on the DVD version of the documentary Super Size Me ,
in which a sample of McDonald's french fries simply refuses to die.)

Mornin worries that trans fats will be replaced by tropical oils and
other saturated fats that she says are equally harmful because they,
too, raise bad cholesterol. Given that obesity is the nation's
number-one health challenge, she urges everyone to aim for a low-fat
diet.

But therein lies an intriguing controversy. Nutrition, like all
sciences, is a slowly evolving discipline. Remember when eggs were
considered dietary villains? So were avocados and chocolate. Now,
they've been redeemed by the discovery that they contain nutrients,
including fats, that do more good than harm.

Contrary to decades of advice to eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet,
scientists now say it is the quality of fat that matters, not the
quantity. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, trans fats
are far worse than saturated fats when it comes to heart disease. And
when it comes to obesity, scientists point out that over the past
decade Americans have actually reduced the number of calories they get
from fat while simultaneously becoming fatter. That's because the
total number of calories they consume in relation to what they burn has
gone up.

Indeed, there is no good evidence for an "optimal" amount of total
fat in a healthy diet. Two large Harvard studies over the past 20 years
found no link between the overall percentage of calories from fat and
any important health outcome, including cancer, heart disease, and
weight gain.

Like my grandma said, eat everything in moderation. Everything, that
is, except trans fats.