Trans fats

[Re-entry]

5 years ago, no one had heard of trans fats. Now they are public enemy no.1.
A new fad, or a deserving bad reputation?
In 2002, the US Natl. Academy of Sciences concluded that the only safe amount of trans fat in the diet is zero.

[A2QFI]

SFAIK a thin spreading of butter is now thought to be less bad for one that the same amount of transfats.

[bear11]

No, just a few chickens coming home to roost. I reckon that consumers became aware of different fat types and products being sold along these lines from the mid-80s in Europe. This interest lead to more research being done, but in a skewed fashion, ie; if the Flora foundation paid for research, what kind of results would you expect? In the first place, you would put the money into research topics that suit you, and secondly could you expect any negative results to be published? Not to pick on anyone in particular, but the dairy business and others to their shame put little money into research on this subject and suffered accordingly. This lead to a situation whereby the research "message" was skewed, and often contradictory. Unfortunately the subject of diet is not well understood, which allows the quacks to get involved as they can't be contradicted, and allows others with money and agendas to "lead" the discussion in the way they want.

So, it's taken 20-ish years for people to be able to see the wood from the trees as enough research has been done to balance everything out, but there's still a lot of outmoded ideas out there on the subject. 15 years ago, it was well-known in the industry that trans or hydrogenated fats were a bad idea, but it has taken that long to percolate through to the public.

You could do a lot worse than read this article, which is a good summary of where current medical knowledge on the subject is:

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

I'm willing to bet most people will be surprised at bits of it given they've been bombarded with contradictory and incorrect messages from reading newspaper headlines and advertisements over the last 15 years.

[Re-entry]

It's interesting that there are few replies to this thread. The evidence is so clear. And it is probably a much bigger issue than smoking.