Some people won't like this article. But I post it because Milloy (www.junkscience.com), as you'll see, rejects the heart-diet dogma. He also points to the lack of studies linking trans fat to heart disease. If there is a grounded rebuttal, I'd love to see it.

Sheldon


McJunk Science
By STEVEN MILLOY

McDonald's just announced it will use a different cooking oil to reduce the amount of trans fatty acids in its fried foods. It sounds like an advance for corporate responsibility and public health. But it's actually a big fat mistake.

The Food and Drug Administration inexplicably has yearned for the last several years to require information about so-called "trans fats" on food nutrition labels. Support for the FDA's plans came in a report released this summer by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, which concluded that no amount of trans fats is safe to eat.

Trans fats, according to the report, raise blood levels of low-density lipoprotein -- the supposedly "bad" cholesterol -- and increase the risk of coronary heart disease. Because trans-fatty acids are "unavoidable in ordinary diets," the Institute of Medicine "recommended that trans fatty acid consumption be as low as possible while consuming a nutritionally adequate diet."

The implications of this report are pretty radical. Margarine, for instance, must be unsafe in any quantity -- never mind that the federal nutrition nannies have spent the last 30 years weaning us away from butter in favor of this supposedly "heart-healthy" substitute. There are also no safe amounts of vegetable shortening or food cooked or made with shortening such as pastries, crackers, and fried foods. All of them contain the dreaded trans fats -- vegetable oils that have been altered to be firm at room temperature.

Don't throw away your favorite foods just yet, however. These recommendations don't have much scientific substance. First, there is no evidence at all that trans fats increase heart disease risk in humans. None of the six studies of human populations consuming trans fats come close to linking them with heart disease. No doubt this is why the Institute of Medicine barely even mentioned their existence in its report and didn't rely on them in the slightest to support its conclusion.

Instead, the report relied on laboratory and clinical studies reporting that trans-fat consumption increased low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels. This is a far cry, though, from scientifically linking trans fats with heart disease.

Moreover, it's not even clear that elevated cholesterol necessarily leads to heart disease and death. In the much-vaunted Framingham Heart Study -- where 5,200 men and women in Framingham, Mass., have been extensively studied in over 1,000 published reports since 1948 -- high cholesterol was not associated with increased heart disease risk after age 47. After age 47, in fact, those whose cholesterol went down had the highest risk of a heart attack. "For each 1 mg/dl drop of cholesterol there was an 11 percent increase in coronary and total mortality," reported the study's authors.

Harvard University researcher Walter Willett acknowledged to science writer Gary Taubes in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story, "What If Fat Doesn't Make You Fat," that though our cholesterol levels have been falling, the incidence of heart disease has not. "That is very disconcerting. It suggests that something else bad is happening," Mr. Willett commented.

Yes, well, whatever "bad" is happening, there certainly is no cause to believe that it's trans fats. Mr. Willett's acknowledgment that the cholesterol-heart disease link is more myth than fact is particularly noteworthy since he is largely responsible for railroading trans fats.

Mr. Willett co-authored every study that claims to link trans-fat consumption with heart-disease risk. Despite his claims, these studies invariably report no or weak statistical associations between trans-fat consumption and heart-disease incidence, and do not rule out other risk factors.

Conveniently, Mr. Willett also co-authors review articles of the trans-fat studies -- including his own -- in which he reiterates his dubious conclusions. Is it too much to ask for some independent researcher -- that is, someone independent from Mr. Willett -- to replicate his claims before the FDA, the Institute of Medicine, and McDonald's lynch trans fats?

My favorite Willett study that fails to link trans fats with heart disease -- one involving 90,000 nurses followed for 20 years -- also fails to link total fat intake, saturated-fat intake, animal-fat intake and cholesterol intake with heart disease.

This is no surprise.

As Mr. Taubes pointed out in his article, the simplistic notion that dietary fat is bad was a political and business judgment, not a scientific one. Despite ambiguous science, in 1977 a Senate committee led by Sen. George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to consume less fat to avoid "killer diseases," then supposedly sweeping the country. The politically dutiful National Institutes of Health soon joined the antifat bandwagon, a move that spawned the low-fat food industry -- a boon to consumer choice but not necessarily one with a beneficial health impact.

McDonald's may be able to pull off the great cooking oil switch without a noticeable flavor difference, and consumers may think they're eating healthier. But there's no evidence they, in fact, will be. In any event, food cooked in the new oil will have the same calories as foods cooked in the old oil. Meet the new oil, the same as the old oil.

McDonald's wants to be a leader in the newthink of "corporate social responsibility." That's fine, but imposing junk science on consumers is not a good start.

Mr. Milloy, a scholar at the Cato Institute and publisher of JunkScience.com, is the author of "Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams" (Cato Institute, 2001).

Updated September 9, 2002

Copyright © 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

It occurs to me that regardless of whether trans fats are bad or neutral, if you eat real whole foods, you won't be getting much trans fat at all, if any. Why use margarine if you can use butter? Who wants processed bake goods? Hydrogenated oils aren't found in nature, so most of us will not encounter them in our diets. The issue might really be moot.

Sheldon

Sheldon...

Most of us won't encounter much trans-fat unless you are eating processed foods. I've found that even some low carb products have hydrogenated oils in them, so it pays to read labels carefully. Although I can't quote you any definitive studies, it's my personal opinion that anytime you take something that is found in nature and alter it for whatever purpose, the result is likely going to be something that is not as good for you as the original food in it's natural state. I honestly can't think of a legitimate reason to eat margarine over butter..YUCK! If margarine tastes so good all by itself, how come everyone is bending over backwards to make it taste more like butter, for example the "I can't believe it's not butter" products? Seems to me that the taste of butter is more preferable any day to that of margarine, even to the folks that make margarine as well as the consumers that buy it. Nope...no frankenfats for me....somebody pass the butter, please.

I think it is a case-by-case empirical question whether something altered from its natural state can be good for you. "Natural" does not equal "good," as anyone who has eaten mushrooms growing in the wild can tell you (or could have told you). Only "good" equals "good."

But in general, I agree with you. There is only one reason people use margarine: they have been brainwashed by the purveyors of the low-fat dogma. The day that dogma falls, I wouldn't want to be holding stock in margarine companies--on margin or otherwise.

Sheldon

Avioiding processed foods of any kind, has got to be the best decision we could make for ourselves :-)
I know it was months before I read TSP that I realized the best food in the supermarket is all on the outside :-)
That makes it pretty easy shopping.
On the Margerine note, my sister and I were noting that its actually hard to get ahold of REAL margerine and that compared to the Spreads out there ( and MOST Of them are NOT ever REAL margerine) it had better texture and flavor.. but even then. BUTTEr is better.
Look at it this way.. one of my favorite high carb foods was chocolate Chip cookies..and the BEST ones out there are made with BUTTER... not Margering or shortening.

Poofie

Just out of curiosity, has anyone used SmartBalance, a margarine without trans fats or hydrogenated oils? I used it before going low-carb. It has olive, among other, oil. It tastes good too.

But butter is better.

Sheldon

I've tried it, but didn't like it nearly as much as butter but I've always been a butter fan...was raised on it. As for natural not always being good...I agree. Arsenic and Hemlock are natural too, but I wouldn't suggest adding them to your diet just because they're natural.

Without being able to cite a particular study ( I could try to look it up), my understanding is that trans fat lowers good cholesterol and increases bad cholesterol. So they concluded that trans fat causes heart disease. My theory anyway.

In any case it's yet another example of "fake" food and I think we are better off without it.

I agree totally Angeline!
It hit me months ago before Schwarzbein that the best foods are on the outside of the supermarket.
:-)
fruits, veggies, real dairy and eggs :-)
Poofie!

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I avoid trans fats also. They are in foods I don't want to eat. But I am intrigued that Malloy, a great debunker of junk science and a low-fat debunker himself, insists that there is no study demonstrating harm to humans. I'm sure if someone showed him such a study, he would revise his view.

Sheldon

well this is what Atkins says in his book (it was the closest thing I had on hand)

"Walter Willett was co-author of a 1993 report on the 85,095 women who were tracked in the Harvard Study, Women with a high intake of trans fats were one an a half times more likely to develop coronary heart disease than women with a low intake of those so-called "foods". Clearly this was not only due to the deleterious effects of eating junk food. For many people, the real shocker in this study was the statistic that women who ate the equivalent of four or more teaspoons of margarine per day had a sixty-six percent greater risk of heart disease than women who ate little or no margarine."

He goes on to explain what I said earlier, that trans fat increases levels of bad cholesterol and lowers good cholesterol.

So there you go ... a study, and a big one at that.

Trans fats may well be dangerous. I'm not saying they are good. But we all know how statistics can be stated in a way that gives a highly misleading picture. I am reading Ravnskov's book The Cholesterol Myths, in which he demonstrates that a study showing that people with low cholesterol had a 400 times better chance of not having a heart attack than those with high cholesterol turns out to be a statistical trick. The real difference in the death rates was .03 vs. 1.3, which is a 400 percent difference, but in absolute terms was really very small.

Malloy talks about Willett in his article that began this thread.

Still abstaining from trans fat,
Sheldon

Finally read that article you linked this thread to (mea culpea, was feeling lazy).

It gets so hard sometimes to know what to believe. Even the same study will be quoted by Atkins as to say trans fat cause heart disease and then a different author says that the study says no such thing.

I think I will just keep on avoiding trans fat because despite all, no one can argue that it's an "altered" food and so, no longer something found in nature. It's good enough reason to avoid it, at least for me.

Try www.westonaprice.org and www.powerhealth.net and www.lowcarbsucess.net under research for more info on transfats among other things.

The fact that many natural things are not safe does not necessarily mean that all unnatural things ARE safe. Certainly heavily processed foods such as trans fats and all of the (mostly high-carb) snackfoods that contain them were not around for most of mankind's history. This type of historical argument is one of the main ones for low-carbing, so I think that the amount of processing a food has undergone should be considered in a similar light if one is a believer in the low-carb WOE. Also, the less processed a food is, the easier it is to be certain of it's nutritional content. I figure that if I can't pronounce most of the ingrediants in a product, it is probably wise to avoid it.