The Queen of Fats by Susan Allport

Author:Susan Allport [Allport, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-520-94132-8
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2006-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

As of January 2006, information about trans fats has joined data on saturated fats on food labels in the United States. But this change won’t lead to healthier eating unless consumers understand the trade-off they will be asked to make in order to have foods that are both trans-free and low in saturates: a higher mono-unsaturate content or a higher omega-6 content. And they must understand that reducing trans and saturated fat is not enough to produce good health: they still need a source of omega-3s. (Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t even a clear scientific consensus on the negative effects of trans fats; much of the push to add trans as well as saturated fats to labels has come from the producers of saturated fats, who felt that they were being unfairly singled out. Recall that the trans fats in vegetable oils result from the partial hydrogenation process that selectively eliminates omega-3s, so only very well-controlled studies are able to distinguish between effects caused by the presence of trans fats in the diet and those caused by the lack of omega-3s. That said, trans fats are less fluid and flexible than cis fats, and they do compete for positions in cell membranes—so it can’t hurt to avoid them. But they don’t play the same important roles as omega-3s and omega-6s.)

There are ways out of this conundrum, but they require backpedaling on the question of saturated fats. European food producers have been using the technique of interesterification to produce oils that are stable and contain a certain amount of alpha linolenic acid, but there is a rub: these oils have more saturated fat than many of the vegetable oils currently available in the United States. In order for these new oils, formed by rearranging the fatty acids on triglycerides, to become acceptable, our government would have to back down on its stance on these fats. It would have to admit that maybe it didn’t know as much as it said it did about the role that fats play in a healthy diet. Vegetable oil producers would have to make the change from hydrogenation to interesterification technology.

Other remedies that might be easier for officials and the public to swallow include supplementation of foods with fish, flax, and alga oils; recommendations to increase consumption of fish and greens; mandatory enrichment of eggs; and the development of high omega-3 oils through other means, including selective breeding and genetic engineering. But sooner or later, the public is going to have to be presented with the whole picture about fats, complicated as it may be. Given the growing number of diseases that are being associated with an imbalance of the essential fats—not just heart disease, cancers, depression, immune disorders, and arthritis but also obesity and diabetes, as the next chapter will show—it should probably be sooner.

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