Thursday, November 7, 2013

Going Back to Butter

The warmth and smell of homemade chocolate chip cookies recalls in most of us a feeling of comfort.  I remember the Saturdays helping my mother make, and eat, warm gooey cookies.  I also remember spooning cups of thick white Crisco into the batter with sugar and sprinkled with chocolate chips.  The taste of these cookies is something any kid would clean his room for, but I always did wonder what is so magical about Crisco?

Vegetable oils are mostly unsaturated fats which are good for us. The problem for the food industry in selling vegetable oils is that they quickly oxidize and go rancid, and thus have a short shelf life.  This was solved in about 1903 through the process of hydrogenation (1).  Healthy unsaturated fats get heated and hydrogenated to create chains of fat which are less reactive with oxygen, and the shelf life is extended.  Crisco and margarines are designed to last through the apocalypse.  As much as a modern miracle this process might sound, it has turned healthy fats into the monster we now call trans fat.  From the 50's to the 90's, Crisco was on the shelf and within reach of all mothers who enjoyed baking (1).  Today, the FDA may be banning mom's secret ingredient.

Trans fat is found only in small amounts in nature.  It is formed when fatty foods get cooked at high temperatures or go through the hydrogenation process.  Like all things new, the food industry backed and promoted hydrogenated oils as being a healthy alternative to saturated fats (2).  However, over the years the increase of trans fat in our processed food has paralleled the increase of obesity and heart disease in our country.  At first, food industry sponsored studies to show that trans fat intake was not related to heart disease.  Ironically, it was causal evidence from their own studies which showed some negative effects of trans fats that prompted the USDA and FDA to further inspection (2).  It was in 2006 that the FDA required labeling for all trans fat content.  Many studies have strongly linked increased trans fats with higher LDL cholesterol, and the increase of arteriosclerosis and coronary heart disease (3).  Another study found that trans fat consumption puts you at risk for heart disease even more than saturated fat consumption (4).  The verdict is in, and trans fats can kill. 

Recently, the FDA announced that trans fats are no longer safe for consumption and they are considering banning them all together as an additive in food products.  This would be a huge change for manufactures but a big step in reducing the cost of America's number one health problem, heart disease.  Strangely, our attempt at imitating the taste and feel of butter for better health has lead us to a unhealthier place.  Sometimes there is just no replacing mother nature's simple products.  It may be time to go back to eating good old butter. 


References:
1. Harvard Public Health Review. Trans Fats: the story behind the label.  2006.  Found online: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/rvw_spring06/rvwspr06_transfats.html

2. Schleifer, David. "We Spent a Million Bucks and Then We Had To Do Something The Unexpected Implications of Industry Involvement in Trans Fat Research." Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 31, no. 6 (2011): 460-471.

3. Ganguly, Riya, and Grant N. Pierce. "Trans fat involvement in cardiovascular disease." Molecular nutrition & food research 56, no. 7 (2012): 1090-1096.
4. Chien, Kuo-Liong, Hung-Ju Lin, Hsiu-Ching Hsu, Pei-Chun Chen, Ta-Chen Su, Ming-Fong Chen, and Yuan-Teh Lee. "Comparison of predictive performance of various fatty acids for the risk of cardiovascular disease events and all-cause deaths in a community-based cohort." Atherosclerosis 230, no. 1 (2013): 140-147.

2 comments:

  1. Michael,
    This topic is a very pressing one as many Americans today experience health issues due to obesity. You mention in the final paragraph of your post that the FDA announced that trans fats are no longer safe for consumption and that they might ban them altogether. I definitely agree that people should not eat foods containing trans fats, however, I'm not sure I completely agree that the FDA should be able to ban trans fats. The consumer should be able to decide what to eat and what not to eat. If people don't want to eat foods containing trans fats, they can decide this for themselves by reading food labels--which I think should be required for all foods, especially those containing trans fats. It seems unnecessary that the government should step in to decide that people can't eat trans fats. Why not just let people take responsibility for what they choose to eat instead of using tax dollars and resources to accomplish this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael,

    I appreciated your topic on trans fats, and enjoyed the irony that the findings of just how unhealthy trans fat is resulted from studies meant to exemplify its healthiness.

    However, Matt, I have a different perspective on the government stepping in to ban trans fats. I agree that people should be free to choose what to eat, and that banning trans fats might be taking the matters to the extremes, but I think there is value in doing so. There are plenty of people today who cannot, or are unaware of how to make healthy food choices. One of the populations I am referring to in particular is that of children. I personally do not know any children who read and understand the information that the nutrition labels provide. Teaching a child about what trans fats are and how they interact with their body is a lot to comprehend at that age. In my opinion, parents should teach their children how to make healthy decisions of what to eat (such as by leading by example), but that would imply that all parents understand how to make informed, healthy food choices and actually apply this knowledge to their own food choices. The growing obesity rates in the United States demonstrate that this is obviously not the case (Adult obesity facts, 2013). How can we protect children from being raised to make these unhealthy choices? I believe that educating both children and parents about nutrition is a good first step, but government intervention to make these foods that we already consume and love even slightly healthier is worth it to me. Besides, the trans fat revolution has been well on its way for a while now, and has been especially influential in the past decade (Brooking, 2010; The oreo case, 2006).

    References:

    (2006). The oreo case. Ban Trans Fats. Retrieved from http://www.bantransfats.com/theoreocase.html

    (2013, August 16). Adult obesity facts. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

    Brooking, K. (2010, January 12). How Americans eat today. CBS News. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-americans-eat-today/

    ReplyDelete