Weighing Trans Fat Substitutes: How Do Alternatives Measure Up?

Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned partially hydrogenated oils. Containing trans fats, these oils increase the risk of heart disease. Now, though, researchers are wondering if the substitutes for these fats will be any healthier. In order to find that out, they've investigated this issue a bit further.

Back in the 1980s and out of a concern about saturated fats, many food manufacturers and consumers made a switch from butter to margarine. Margarine actually contains trans fat, but at the time it wasn't recognized as a threat to heart health. Artificial trans fats proliferated largely in the form of partially hydrogenated oil. People baked with it, fried with it and placed it on other items of food. Yet within the past two decades, its effect on cholesterol has become clear; it's raised the "bad" cholesterol while decreasing the "good" kind.

In fact, food makers and restaurants have been taking notice. Since at least 2006, they've been turning to liquid vegetable and tropical oils as alternatives. When they need a solid fat, they use fully hydrogenated oils and other modified fats. Even so, though, trans fat was still found in some processed foods. That's why the FDA revoked the "generally recognized as safe" status of partially hydrogenated oils. This effectively banned trans fats in food.

So are substitutes safe? The researchers found that the alternatives replacing trans fats are healthier. The healthiest they found is when vegetable oils with high unsaturated fat content are used as substitutes. That said, these fats aren't the only unhealthy ingredient of processed foods. These items can also contain high amounts of salt and sugar. Yet it seems that for now, other oils are indeed safer.

The findings reveal the importance of taking into account not only health benefits, but also negatives when using different ingredients in foods.

The article is published in Chemical & Engineering News.