The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz

Author:Nina Teicholz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Oils That Replaced Trans Fats

Amazingly, considering all the work involved in this huge industry changeover, it’s not clear that Americans are now eating oils that are any healthier. A good portion of the trans fat alternatives are simply vegetable oils, including some new, untested varieties that could very well be even less healthy than the partially hydrogenated kind we are now ushering out.

The onus of finding trans-free alternatives fell not on the food manufacturers, nor on fast-food restaurants, who don’t make their own ingredients, but rather on the big edible-oils suppliers: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Dow Chemical Company, Loders Croklaan, Unilever, and Bungee. Unlike the food manufacturers, which took a wait-and-see attitude toward the trans fat regulations, the big oil companies had instead tried to get out ahead of the curve years before the FDA ruling.

The industry faced the same problem that it had one hundred years earlier: how to harden an oil so that it would be functional in cooking and baking and also not oxidize easily? Hydrogenation had solved those problems for the twentieth century; now, with partial hydrogenation off the table, new solutions were needed.

One new fat that came out of industry labs was made through a process called interesterification, a word that itself possibly spares the arteries by clogging the palate. Oil chemists had been working on this type of new fat on and off for decades and had stepped up efforts in the late 1970s when Kummerow’s work first exposed the potential health dangers of trans fats.X

To understand interesterification, there’s yet another detail about fat chemistry to know. All fatty acid chains are bound in packs of three, bound together by a “glycerol” molecule at their base, like a pitchfork. These pitchforks are the triglycerides that we’ve learned about: the fats floating around in our blood stream which, at high levels, are a risk factor for heart disease. Interesterification works by swapping around the order of the tines (fatty acid chains) on the pitchfork. But it’s an inexact science, as Gil Leveille explained. “Interesterification is akin to hitting something with a sledgehammer, because you randomly distribute all the fatty acids on the glycerol. It produces a lot of new triglycerides,” many of which we know nothing about. As of 2013, the process of interesterifying fats was still too expensive to be the preferred option for most food operations, but they are now being widely used. Leveille and others are therefore nervous about the health implications: “We just don’t know,” he judges. “It could be another trans lurking; we really need to look at it and understand it.” And of course, in the same way that consumers didn’t know that they were eating trans fats, they now don’t know they’re eating interesterified fats, because they are listed on the food label simply as “oil” (usually “soybean oil”).

Rancidity in vegetable oils is caused by one type of fatty acid called linolenic, which the process of hydrogenation was able to reduce. One intriguing idea for minimizing linoleic

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