Trans fat: oil of the damned or no badder than butter?

So I just spent an awful lot of time reading a couple of posts and hundreds of comments over at the Tierney Lab blog at the NYTimes. In a nutshell: John Tierney (wonderful science writer, especially in psychology) wrote a post about the Harvard School of Public Health giving an award to NYC Mayor Bloomberg for banning trans fats. The award was given by Walter Willett of HSPH, the most influential epidemiologist studying trans fats and the biggest academic critic of their use.

So yay for Bloomberg, because trans fats are totally evil right? I mean they raise bad cholesterol, lower good cholesterol, cause inflammation and raise the risk of heart attacks by 23% when we eat just 2% of calories in trans fats.

But trans fats aren’t so super evil according to Tierney. He goes on to write that a lot of scientists aren’t convinced that trans fats are the food from heart attack hell, citing this article in the NYTimes from 2005, which kind of vaguely says that all these really important science organizations don’t think trans fats are any worse than plain old saturated fats like butter and lard (yummmmm), as we don’t quite know the ramifications of lowered “good” cholesterol.

He then goes on to quote Elizabeth Whalen from the American Council on Science and Health, which essentially agrees that trans fats don’t seem dramatically more scary than regular saturated fats and that all those trans fat free! labels might do more harm than good because all the hype around this issue might make people think said food is “healthy.”

He basically says that the trans fat ban is all hype and based on “questionable science.” Erm.

His readers took the opportunity to point out that Whalen and the ACSH have corporate funding from many food companies and have often been accused of being apologists for the no-so-healthy foods they make. I’ve researched them a little and yes they seem to err on the side of “it’s not SUCH a big deal....” on many health topics, but I think they still have enough medical research credit to make their opinions interesting and useful, even verging on sensible. Hype and horror is always bad, surely.  Erring on the side of caution, however, is just as sensible in certain situations. Like trans-fats.

But I digress. My original point in all this was to give my perception of the science of trans fats.

My real fear of trans fats came from a monkey study by Wake Forest University researcher Kylie Kavanaugh. I interviewed her last year for this story and she freaked the crap out of me. She conducted a study on monkeys (peopley enough for me!) and found that those who ate had 8% of calories from trans fats in their diet (the average US consumer eats 2-3%) gained more than 7% of their body weight over 6 years. The control monkeys ate the same number of calories, and the same amount of total fat (just not trans) and gained 1.8%.

What’s more...all the trans fat flab went straight to the monkeys bellies, scary scary belly fat. What’s MORE, the amount of calories supplied was designed specifically so they wouldn’t gain weight at all (here is a link to the full paper, which was published this summer; the original report came from a conference in 2006).

That’s just creepy. 

The available evidence suggests that trans-fats are not good for you. Some epidemiological work suggests they are even worse than saturated fat. Until the FDA changed the labeling laws in January of 2006, trans fats were lumped under the healthier UNsaturates category. And while the NYC ban might have been premature, a little nanny state-esque, I still think it’s good: at least then I know there aren’t BAD (trans or saturated) fats where there is an alternative. If chefs/cooks can’t use unsaturated fats as a replacement for baking or frying, then they’ll use butter or lard...which is either slightly better or the same.

Does the ban deserve a prize? I dont’ know.  Only hindsight, 500 more studies and ample room for paradigm shifts will tell us whether Bloomberg and the NYC Health Commissioner were brilliant and forward thinkers or autocratic suckers lookin’ for a medical scapegoat and some political points.