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When Killer Trans Fats Are Ignored, Study Results Are Meaningless

by Heidi Stevenson

23 March 2010

Yet another study purporting to show that saturated fats are bad and polyunsaturated fats are good completely misses the mark. In effect, the study most likely demonstrated only that eating fats partially altered by hydrogenation—polyunsaturated oils—is less harmful than eating fully hydrogenated fats.

No attempt was made to distinguish between natural saturated fats and unnatural trans fats. In fact, neither trans fats nor hydrogenated fats (another term for trans fats) were referenced in the study.

Trans fats are endemic in most modern diets. Most likely, most people in these studies were eating large portions of trans fats. The study is, therefore, meaningless if all you're concerned about is comparing adulterated trans fats. If you're interested in natural healthy fats, which include both saturated and monounsaturated fats then nothing of value was discovered. Of course, these are the only fats anyone should be eating.

To set the record straight, there is nothing inherently wrong with polyunsaturated fats. However, they have a very short shelf life, so it's impossible to bring them to market in today's modern world without hydrogenating them. Even if they're not labeled as such, liquid vegetable oils in supermarkets must be partially hydrogenated. Of course, the fact that they're only partially hydrogenated, which allows them to remain liquid, means that they don't do as much harm as fully hydrogenated solid fats, like margarine or shortening.

The Study

The study⁽¹⁾, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a Searle Scholar Award, was a meta analysis of 8 trials that encompassed 13,614 subjects who had a total of 1,042 coronary heart disease events.

It purports to show that each 5% increase in polyunsaturated fats as a proportion of total dietary calories reduces cardiovascular disease by 10%, with an average of 19% for all participants. The one genuinely good piece of information is that it shows benefits for fat intake over the recommended daily allowance of 5-10% for polyunsaturated fats in the total diet.

The Shift of Focus

As is so often the case, modern medicine and its adjunct, pseudo-science, control perceptions of issues by changing terminology and focus. In the case of fats, rather than focusing on natural distinctions of saturated, poly-, and mono- unsaturated fats, and acknowledging that hydrogenation changes their nature, the focus has been changed. In effect, ignoring the single most important factor in analyzing fats—hydrogenation—is ignored as if it makes no difference. This isn't science that's meaningful.

As I've pointed out before, the real issue isn't saturated versus unsaturated fats, but whether the fats are hydrogenated. When they are, they act differently in the body. The fact is that we require saturated fats as a significant part of diet. When they're replaced with trans fats, they replace saturated fats in our bodies with disastrous results. See Why Hydrogenated Fat Is So Bad for an easy to follow explanation of how they do so much damage.

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