In March, the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene asked the city's 20,000 restaurants and 14,000 food suppliers to eliminate partly hydrogenated oils from kitchens and provide foods free of industrially produced trans fatty acids.
The request comes on the heels of accumulating evidence that trans fats are bad news indeed. In a recent review in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that even low levels of trans fats in the diet—a mere 1 or 2 percent of calories per day—were linked to a substantially increased risk of heart disease.
In studies of 140,000 individuals, consuming 2 percent of calories as trans fats resulted in a 23 percent increase in heart disease. With the new alarm bells have come a flurry of industry damage control, including Op-Ed pieces appearing in the major newspapers bemoaning the government intrusion into personal food choices and declaring that the alternatives to trans fats are even worse.
Some of the most furious back peddling comes from Jane Brody, nutrition columnist for the New York Times. While admitting that "partially hydrogenated fatty acids in margarine and many processed foods are harmful to health—more harmful, in fact, than the saturated fat in butter," Brody takes pains to explain why we should not assume that butter is healthier. "Butter is not a heart-healthy choice because its saturated fat far outweighs the trans fat in traditional stick margarines. Also, butter contains cholesterol, which can raise blood levels of cholesterol in some people; margarine, which is made from vegetable sources, does not."
Brody also bemoans the fact that substitutions of tropical oils like palm, palm kernel, and coconut oils "are reintroducing more heart-damaging saturated fats" (New York Times, Sept. 5, 2006).
As a result of all this misinformation, restaurants have started using liquid vegetable oils instead of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. The dangerous effects of free radicals and other toxic breakdown products in liquid vegetable oils are one of the reasons the industry switched to hardened vegetable fats several decades ago.
Source: http://www.westonaprice.org/causticcommentary/caustic-commentary-2006wi.html
Reproduced with permission