http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070129-100513-9865r

Eat To Live: Meet trans fat's replacement
Julia Watson
UPI
January 29, 2007

WASHINGTON --  New York has banned trans fats from its restaurants.
Philadelphia and Los Angeles are considering following its example.
Starbucks has just announced it is the latest chain going trans fat-
free. So what will replace trans fats in our foods? Meet the dreadful
new word: "interesterified fats."

Food manufacturers loved trans fats. They were essential to baked
goods and fried food. They prolonged a processed food's shelf life.
They stabilized its flavor. What was not to like?

Well, many things really. What happened when vegetable oil was
solidified by means of adding hydrogen to it - the process behind the
making of trans fats - was that they raised our so-called bad
cholesterol, while diminishing the cholesterol that was good for our
hearts.

But if trans fats are withdrawn, something has to take their place if
we are to continue eating processed and fried foods.

Enter interesterified fats. These are fats modified by procedures that
include hydrogenation, followed by the rearrangement of fat molecules
through a process called interesterification. Already they are being
introduced into a number of processed foods as the most popular
substitute for hydrogenated oils.

Watch out, though! Interesterified fats may be better for our
cholesterol, but they could be bad for our blood glucose.

Trans fats were not too good for it either. But in a study just
published in Nutrition and Metabolism, Dr. K.C. Hayes of Brandeis
University in Massachusetts, and T. Karupaiah and Kalyana Sundram from
the Malaysian Palm Oil Board discovered that while trans fat "has a
weak negative influence on blood glucose," interesterified fat
"appears even worse in that regard, raising glucose 20 percent in a
month."

Their findings should be weighed with a certain caution, since the
three authors are employed by, or connected to, the Malaysian Palm Oil
Board, which funded it. Palm oil, which may have overtaken global
soybean oil production, is an almost solid vegetable oil, relatively
high in saturated fats, and used widely in Asia and Latin America.

Still, it is alarming that the healthy volunteers spent only four
weeks on interesterified fats before their blood glucose levels
rocketed. There were 30 volunteers, following three different diets
for four weeks each time.

What distinguished the diets was the type of fat providing roughly 30
percent of the calories from fat in each. One diet was based on palm
oil, one on partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and the third on an
interesterified soybean oil.

In the latter, the volunteers' "good" cholesterol levels were lowered
while their blood sugar levels increased by 20 percent compared to the
palm oil diet.

Before we rush to judgment, another study, by the National Institute
of Food Hygiene and Nutrition in Budapest, Hungary, fed rats with one
diet containing sunflower oil and lard, and another with sunflower oil
and interesterified lard. When they checked the distribution of fatty
acids and good and bad cholesterol in the heart muscle and liver, they
concluded that there was little difference between the two diets. In
fact, in certain cases they found the diet with the
interesterification of the lard "slightly more favorable."

The Unilever Research Laboratory in the Netherlands compared the
impact of commonly-used edible vegetable fats against interesterified
fats on 60 humans. Those researchers found no particular adverse
effect with the latter. Unilever, of course, is a major producer of
processed foods, and keen to find an acceptable replacement for trans
fats.

We may be in for a possible replay of the time we were advised to
discard butter in favor of margarine, until it was realized that
margarine, being a trans fat, was less healthy than natural butter.
Who knows, trans fats may be back in our diets some time in the
future.

*******

More god-damned fake manufactured highly-processed garbage fats. That
is all we really friggin' need.

TC