http://atkins.com/Archive/2003/7/31-167227.html
Trans Fats Heat Up
By Colette Heimowitz, M.S.
Dr. Atkins railed against trans fatty acids, a.k.a. trans fats, for years, but until recently most people didn't know even what they were. However, two recent events have focused attention on this artificial additive. Recently a lawsuit was filed in California against the cookie giant Nabisco. The suit charged that Nabisco was endangering children's health by marketing Oreos® to them because the cookies (like almost all packaged cookies) have a high trans fat content. We at Atkins Nutritionals were pleased that the news media gave so much press to the lawsuit: It's a vivid reminder that trans fats won't go away unless we make them.

The Oreo/trans fat brouhaha was hot news, even if it's about an old hat. Researchers at Harvard and elsewhere have made it plain that trans fatty acids have been a killer since the 1930s, when the swift expansion of margarine consumption put trans fat firmly on the breakfast table. Little guessing the harm they would cause, food chemists took vegetable oils and through the application of extreme heat and the addition of hydrogen reconfigured the chemical structure of the fat; the distorted molecule that resulted was a trans fatty acid. Its inventors dubbed it "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil," and it exists on food labels under that name. It takes some effort to find a cracker, a doughnut or a french fry in this country that isn't drenched in the stuff.

Why did the industrial food giants do this?

Well, the practical benefits of hydrogenation were immense. Vegetable oils solidify during the hydrogenation process and become almost impervious to spoilage. Crisco® is marketed to home cooks for baking, but trans fats have transformed the packaged foods industry. They ensure a long shelf life and a texture that doesn't crumble, ideal qualities in foods that are transported long distances and stacked in supermarkets. Furthermore, huge soybean crops meant low prices for soybean oil. Restaurants were ready. The demonization of saturated fat took its toll. Home cooks and institutions alike dropped butter and lard; hydrogenated oil became the cooking oil of choice in nearly every fast food restaurant in America. And if many nutritionists will tell you there isn't a food on the American menu more unhealthy than fast-food french fries, that's largely because they know about trans fats.

More than 10 years of published research shows trans fats adversely affect cholesterol levels in the human body, causing ("bad") LDL cholesterol to go up and ("good") HDL cholesterol to go down. The all-important HDL/LDL ratio is therefore twice as unfavorable when trans fats are consumed as when plain old saturated fat is eaten in its place. And while saturated fat is something the human body needs, nobody needs a fat that didn't even exist before it was invented. Moreover, studies now show that lipoprotein, a particularly bad factor when it comes to arterial health, is significantly increased by consumption of trans fats. Need more bad news? Trans fats push up triglyceride levels.

This collection of grim warnings is almost certainly not a false alarm. In 1993, Dr. Walter Willett and his team at Harvard decided to measure the effects of margarine versus butter on the 80,000 women being tracked by the Harvard Nurses' Study. They were stunned to discover that women who were eating the equivalent of four or more teaspoons of margarine daily had a 66 percent greater risk of developing heart disease than women whose consumption was very low. They found no increased cardiovascular risk among women who ate butter, a saturated fat.

Willett's team estimated then that approximately 30,000 premature deaths from heart disease annually might be attributed to trans fat consumption. They now think 100,000 deaths a year is more accurate.

Let's go back to the Oreo suit for a moment. A few days after it was filed, the lawyer withdrew the lawsuit, claiming that his objective was to raise awareness of the issue and that the media coverage had taken care of that. Interestingly, within weeks of the on-and-then-off suit, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally got off its duff on this critical issue. Since 1999, the FDA had been considering a regulation that all labels must list trans fat quantities. Not surprisingly, the proposal was vigorously challenged by food manufacturers. But on July 8, the FDA finally mandated the change in labels; unfortunately, however, the new labeling will not go into effect until 2006.

The implications of the new ruling go far beyond product labeling. Now that manufacturers will have to list the amount of trans fats in their products, most will likely make an effort to reduce that amount. This may well mean that they have to again use saturated fats.

The choice is stark for much of the food sold on supermarket shelves. If it isn't going to contain trans fat, it has to contain saturated fat. In most processed food—which on Atkins you aren't eating anyway—hydrogenated oil will likely be replaced with palm oil, which is highly saturated. Yet most scientists who research trans fats find the whole issue a no-brainer: Palm oil is healthier. Atkins has always taken this position.

The winds of change are blowing. McDonald's has announced that it will now fry its foods with corn oil instead of hydrogenated oil; estimates are that this will drop the trans fat content of its foods by 48 percent. And Frito-Lay has taken the hydrogenated oil out of its potato chips.

Once the FDA's labeling changes occur—and it's pretty certain they will—the fat wars will enter a new and more intense phase. We suspect that it will take more than one high profile lawsuit. Wait until most of the packaged food in the supermarket bears little stickers reading NO TRANS FATS.

Until then, you'll have to chew on the unsavory fact that your arteries are being clogged by an artificial fatty additive that industry and government united to promote as healthy. Since not just Oreos but 40 percent of the food on the supermarket shelf contains it—according to the USDA—perhaps you should stamp your feet and let your congressman and senators know that you're concerned about this issue.

Nutritionist Colette Heimowitz, M.S., is the director of education and research for Atkins Health and Medical Information Services.