The Absolute Truth About Dietary Fat

Are you confused about dietary fat? Who isn’t? To put your mind at ease, here is the absolute truth about dietary fat. The truth is that….

…there is NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH about dietary fat…

….. and that’s the absolute truth.

Here’s why. Nutrition is a comparatively new science. New discoveries are being made every day when it comes to both human and animal nutrition. The current controversy about trans fats is a perfect example.

Trans fats were invented in 1901 by a group of chemists at Proctor & Gamble who were trying to find a way to make artificial candle wax. But just as the product was ready for market, electrical lighting became available and in most homes candles were replaced by light bulbs. So the scientists looked for other applications and realized that the stuff just didn’t go bad. And, after all, it was made from cottonseed oil, which is edible, so, in 1911, Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco, a contraction of the term “crystallized cottonseed oil”. It wasn’t a big success at first, because consumers had no idea what to do with it until P&G published a cookbook in 1912, included free with every purchase of Crisco.

Even though Crisco became a staple on every housewife’s shelf, trans fats weren’t added to many foods until World War II, when butter was rationed. That’s when another product took hold in the American household – margarine. Now, margarine was actually invented in 1869 by a pharmacist/chemist in France, in response to a contest sponsored by Napoleon III to spur develop of new, cheaper sources of cooking fat. Hydrogenation had not yet been invented, so it was a whole different product than the margarine of today. It was beef tallow, mixed chemically with a little real butter or other oil to make a solid butter substitute. By the 1870s, it was being sold in the US, but there wasn’t a big market for it.

But with time came change. World Wars I and II, and the Great Depression, made food scarce and expensive. Margarine provided a cheap substitute. In the 1920’s, margarine manufacturers added Vitamins A and D to their product to make its nutritional profile appear equivalent to butter. In the 1930’s, margarine manufacturers, in response to taxation that had been forced by the dairy industry, switched from animal fat to hydrogenated vegetable oil, better known these days as trans fat. By World War II, consumers had started to accept margarine as the equivalent of butter in terms of taste and nutrition.

In the 1950s and 60s, food processors developed hundreds of new convenience foods that were loaded with trans fats. Studies had shown that bugs and mice wouldn’t eat them, mold wouldn’t grow on them, and they basically didn’t support life. That was considered a good thing. These were foods that just didn’t go bad!

From the 1950s on, heart disease soared as the consumption of trans fats increased, but nobody put it together. Instead, the exact opposite occurred. Medical researchers zeroed in on cholesterol. At first, they concentrated on total cholesterol. They found that people who ate margarine had lower total cholesterol than people who ate butter and lard. They also found that there was a higher death rate from heart disease among people who ate margarine, even though their total cholesterol was lower. The researchers chose to ignore the death rate and trumpet their findings on cholesterol. Doctors and nutritionists started telling the public that margarine and other so-called unsaturated fats were the healthier choice.

By the 1970s, there was a somewhat better understanding of the different types of cholesterol, especially HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol). Nutrition science found that saturated fats, like those found in meat, eggs, and dairy, raised LDL cholesterol. They also found that trans fats both raised LDL and lowered HDL. This is why trans fats are dangerous. They lower total cholesterol by lowering good cholesterol.

Ironically, the in the 1960s, a little company called MacDonald’s started franchising. They struck a deal with a small company that produced edible fat for the restaurant industry. This company was so small that it didn’t have its own hydrogenating equipment – they manufactured fat for frying the old fashioned way, with beef tallow and oil. This is what gave MacDonald’s French fries their distinctive, and wildly popular, flavor. And it is what made MacDonald’s a target in the 1970s, when nutrition activists targeted them for frying French fries in saturated, animal fat. MacDonald’s responding by switching to the fats that scientists were telling the populace were healthy, even though there was already plenty of evidence that hydrogenated oils, now better known as trans fats, were dangerous.

Within a few years, there was a turnaround in the scientific view on trans fat. In the early 1980s, Harvard’s School of public Health started issuing warnings about trans fats. That was about 25 years ago, and action is just being taken today. In the meantime, medical researchers estimate that there have been about 30,000 deaths per year as a result of trans fat-caused heart disease. Over a 50-year period, that totals 1.5 million deaths. A link has also been found between trans fats and hypothyroid.

MacDonald’s is reformulating its cooking oil to remove the trans fats. Frito-Lay went trans fat free a couple of years ago. Kraft, one of the biggest trans fat offenders, is reformulating all of its products. And even Oreos and other Nabisco products are being reformulated.

But what are nutritionists saying? According to USA Today (February 23, 2007), nutritionists who work for the food processing industry are claiming that the new emphasis on trans fats is only a distraction from the real issues – that Americans simply eat too much food, too much junk food, and don’t focus on a healthful diet, including fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. After all, they point out that trans fats only account for about 3% of total fat consumption, while saturated fats account for 12%. But nutritionists who work for consumer advocate groups are calling for trans fats to be outlawed. Dr. Walter Willett, head of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health calls trans fat “a metabolic poison that has no place in human diets (that) should be eliminated as quickly as possible.”

So the controversy continues. The point is that the link between dietary fat and human health is simply not understood. Scientists and nutritionists have an unfortunate way of stating their findings as if those findings were fact. Scientists are natural skeptics, and we should be, too.


For more informational controversy, check out these links:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/rvw_spring06/rvwspr06_transfats.html

http://www.cspinet.org/new/transpr.html

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/transfats.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57486,00.html

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/qatrans2.html

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/03/07/transfat/index.html