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.