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Thursday, December 19, 2013

A Lifelong Fight Against Trans Fats

In 1957, a fledgling nutrition scientist at the University of Illinois persuaded a hospital to give him samples of arteries from patients who had died of heart attacks.

When he analyzed them, he made a startling discovery. Not surprisingly, the diseased arteries were filled with fat — but it was a specific kind of fat. The artificial fatty acids called trans fats, which come from the hydrogen-treated oils used in processed foods like margarine, had crowded out other types of fatty acids.

The scientist, Fred Kummerow, followed up with a study that found troubling amounts of artery-clogging plaque in pigs given a diet heavy in artificial fats. He became a pioneer of trans-fat research, one of the first scientists to assert a link between heart disease and processed foods.

It would be more than three decades before those findings were widely accepted — and five decades before the Food and Drug Administration decided that trans fats should be eliminated from the food supply, as it proposed in a rule issued last month.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Paula Deen had it right: Butter is everything!

Anonymous said...

And to think they told us margarine was better for us.

Here's what I've learned...nothing is better than real, natural food. Stop buying and eating processed junk. Do most of your shopping on the outside of the grocery store. Fresh is better.

The simple way to put it - if God didn't make it on his own, don't consume it. He gave us everything that we need, and we're not going to outsmart him.

Anonymous said...

Dang, but thanks for finally telling me! I'll eat nothing but natural from nooooooowwwwwww......aaaaagggggghhhhhh.....uuuuunnnngggghhhhhh! (slump)