It’s good to hear it from others!

Definitely information I’ve been preaching as part of our Feed For Success program along with Feeding Oats and NO to commercial cooked feed (add out Just Add Oats ) …. say NO to salt blocks (YES to Red Cal free-choice) and of course YES to ourGMO-free Weight Check Oil and NO the bad oils and fat. This is info of course that you can apply to ALL— people, pets and horses… but of course animals don’t lie!

What’s Wrong with
Partially Hydrogenated Oils?

Summary
Consuming partially hydrogenated oils is like inhaling cigarette smoke. They will kill you — slowly, over time, but as surely as you breathe. And in the meantime, they will make you fat!
[1700 words]

Eric Armstrong
TreeLight.com/Health

Why Fats are Important

The first thing to understand about fats is that the essential fatty acids they contain are truly essential. They are the "active ingredient" in every bodily process you can name:

brain cell function and nervous system activity
hormones and intra-cellular messengers
glandular function and immune system operation
hemoglobin oxygen-transport system
cell wall function:
- passing oxygen into the cell
- passing nutrients into the cell
- keeping foreign bodies out of the cell
digestive-tract operation
- assimilating nutrients
- blocking out allergens

In short, the essential fatty acids (contained mostly in polyunsaturated oils) are the most important nutrients there are — more important than vitamins, minerals, or even proteins. Because, without them, there is no life. They are the substance and foundation of life energy.

What is Hydrogenation?

Hydrogenation is the process of heating an oil and passing hydrogen bubbles through it. The fatty acids in the oil then acquire some of the hydrogen, which makes it more dense. If you fully hydrogenate, you create a solid (a fat) out of the oil. But if you stop part way, you a semi-solid partially hydrogenated oil that has a consistency like butter, only it’s a lot cheaper.

Because of that consistency, and because it is cheap, it is a big favorite as a butter-substitute among "food" producers. It gives their products a richer flavor and texture, but doesn’t cost near as much as it would to add butter.

Note:
Until the 1970′s, food producers used coconut oil to get that buttery flavor and texture. The American obesity epidemic began when it was replaced with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil — most often soybean oil. For more information, see Coconut Oil and Palm Kernel Oil: Miracle Medicine and Diet Pill.

What’s Wrong with Hydrogenation?

Unlike butter or virgin coconut oil, hydrogenated oils contain high levels of trans fats. A trans fat is an otherwise normal fatty acid that has been "transmogrified", by high-heat processing of a free oil. The fatty acids can be double-linked, cross-linked, bond-shifted, twisted, or messed up in a variety of other ways.

The problem with trans fats is that while the "business end" (the chemically active part) is messed up, the "anchor end" (the part that is attached to the cell wall) is unchanged. So they take up their position in the cell wall, like a guard on the fortress wall. But like a bad guard, they don’t do their job! They let foreign invaders pass unchallenged, and they stop supplies at the gates instead of letting them in.

In short, trans fats are poisons, just like arsenic or cyanide. They interfere with the metabolic processes of life by taking the place of a natural substance that performs a critical function. And that is the definition of a poison. Your body has no defense against them, because they never even existed in our two billion years of evolution — so we’ve never had the need or the opportunity to evolve a defense against them.

But the worst part is that in the last stages of oil processing (or "refining"), the oil is literally steam distilled to remove its odor. So it doesn’t smell. But a hydrogenated oil is much worse than rancid butter. So it it did smell, it would smell worse than the most rancid butter you’ve ever seen. (And that goes for all refined oils, not just the hydrogenated ones. It’s just that hydrogenated oils are everywhere in the American diet.) So the next time you see "partially hydrogenated oil" on a label, think "rancid butter".

Partially Hydrogenated Oils Make You Fat!

Partially hydrogenated oils will not only kill you in the long term by producing diseases like multiple sclerosis and allergies that lead to arthritis, but in the meantime they will make you fat!

You Eat More

It’s not like you have any choice in the matter. Remember that the essential fatty acids are vital to every metabolic function in your body. You will get the quantity of essential fatty acids that you need to sustain life, no matter what. You will not stop being hungry until you do.

If you are consuming lots of saturated fats, you really have no choice but to become fat, because saturated fats contain only small quantities of the polyunsaturated fats that contain the essential fatty acids you need. The key to being thin, then, is to consume foods containing large amounts of polyunsaturated oils. (Those foods include fish, olives, nuts, and egg yolks.) Over the long term, those foods remove your sense of hunger.

Note:
The difference between a "fat" and an "oil" is temperature. A "fat" is a lipid that is solid at room temperature. An "oil" is one that is liquid at room temperature. Both are lipids (or "oil/fat"). Change the temperature, and you can convert an oil into a fat, or vice versa.

Partially hydrogenated oils make you gain weight the same way that saturated fats do — by making you consume even more fat to get the the essential fatty acids you need. But partially hydrogenated fats are even worse. Not only do they produce disease over they long term, but they interfere with the body’s ability to ingest and utilize the good fats!

Picture it like this. The trans fats are now the guards along the watchtower. The essential fatty acids (the support troops) are waiting outside to get into the fort (the cell), so they can be distributed along the watchtower (the cell wall). But the guards won’t let them in! So they have to find someplace to stay in town. Over time, more and more troops are finding lodging in town. So new houses (fat cells) have to built to keep them in. The town grows more and more swelled with troops (fat), and it gets bigger and bigger (fatter). It’s not a pretty picture at all, when you realize that the town is your belly, buns, face, and neck.

Your Metabolism Slows

Worse, most partially hydrogenated oil is partially hydrogenated soybean oil. That’s a problem, because soybean oil depresses the thyroid–which lowers your energy levels, makes you feel less like exercising, and generally makes you fatter!

Of course, soybeans have been used for centuries in the Orient–but mostly as the basis for soy sauce and tofu. Asians didn’t have soy milk, soy burgers, soy this and soy that. Most of all, they never used concentrated essence of soybean, in the form of soybean oil. And they didn’t hydrogenate it, and they didn’t use it in everything.

Walking down supermarket aisles in America, you find product after product with partially hydrogenated oil–often in products you would never expect. But why not? After all, it’s cheaper than butter. And it’s not illegal. Yet. When you eat out, restaurant breads and fried foods are loaded with stuff.

As a result, Americans are consuming soybean oil–partially hydrogenated soybean oil–in virtually everything they eat. It’s no wonder that America is experiencing epidemic levels of diabetes, obesitiy, heart disease, and cancer.

Avoiding Hydrogenation

When you start reading food labels, it is astonishing how many products you will find that contain partially hydrogenated oils. In the chips aisle, there are maybe two brands that don’t: Lay’s Classic Potato Chips (not their other brands), and Laura Scudders chips. Most every other package on the shelf does.

Then there are the cookies and crackers. Most every single one does. About the only cookie that doesn’t is Paul Neuman’s fig newtons. Among peanut butters, the all-natural brands (Adams and Laura Scudders) don’t. All the rest seem to.

Even some items on the "health food" shelf, like Tigers Milk bars, contain partially hydrogenated oils. Can you imagine that?? A product marketed as a "health food" that contains partially hydrogenated oils? If they want to market it as a candy bar, fine. Caveat emptor. But to market it as a health food calls for a class action lawsuit on the basis of false advertising.

The more labels you read, the more astonished you will be at the variety and number of places that this insidious little killer shows up. Do read the labels. Do recoil in disgust, and do throw the product back on the shelf — or throw it on the floor, where it belongs.

And it’s not just partially hydrogenated oils, anymore…
When I first wrote this article in 1998, I asked myself, "What’s going to happen when consumers begin to become aware of the dangers of partially hydrogenated oils? Are manufacturers going to stop using it? I figured that the answer, unfortunately, would be "No". They would probably just give it a new name. Well, it appears that the worst may have come to pass. Alert readers Robin Jutras, Gerard Lally, and ___ clued me in to the fact that manufacturers are now using mono- and di-glycerides–which are also hydrogenated oil products.

Deep-Fried Foods: The Ultimate Killer

Fortunately, this information is beginning to penetrate the public consciousness. Recently, a news special covered the subject. The reporter got some of the details wrong, but the general message was right on the money. And the one surprising tidbit of information in the report was the fact that most of the deep-fried foods served in fast food joints are fried in partially hydrogenated oils!

Now, deep frying all by itself is pretty bad. After all, you are applying a lot of heat. But if that heat is applied to a saturated fat, there is a limit to how much harm it can do. A saturated fat doesn’t have a "business end". There is no part of it that is chemically active. It’s inert. Your body can burn it for fuel, but it can’t use it to carry out any of your metabolic processes.

But because a saturated fat is inert, it can’t be hurt much by heat. It’s not all that good for you, but it’s not terrible either. So if you’re going to fry, fry in a fully saturated fat like lard, or coconut oil. Or, use butter, which consists mostly of short-chain saturated fats that are easily burned for fuel, plus conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) which improves health (Bruce Fife, Detox, 68). And butter tastes great. It’s so good, in fact, that you don’t even need to use very much to get a lot of flavor. So at home you can fry with butter to get gourmet-quality food that is also healthy.

Even better, you could fry with coconut oil — which consists of medium chain fatty acids that contain 2/3′s the calories of long-chain saturated fats. They’re also metabolized differently, so they’re burned for energy instead of being stored as fat. And if that’s not enough, 50% of coconut oil consists of lauric acid, a medium-chain fatty acid that’s anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungus, and anti-yeast. (For more information, see Coconut Oil and Palm Kernel Oil: Miracle Medicine and Diet Pill.)

For commercial deep frying, though, butter is prohibitively expensive. Things were better when foods were fried in beef tallow and coconut oil, because they had a lot of flavor and the saturated fats aren’t harmed by the heat. But all that saturated fat sounds bad, so restaurants switched to partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. One "healthy" Mexican restaurant even advertised that they fried in vegetable oil. That would be somewhat better than partially hydrogenated oil — assuming that they weren’t using partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in the the first place — but subjecting the unsaturated fatty acids contained in a vegetable oil to the high heat of a deep frying vat is deadly, especially when the oil is used and reused all day long. The result would be the same kind of trans fats that you get in the hydrogenation process!

But the absolute worst commercial frying is done by the fast-food chains, who almost uniformly do their deep frying in cheap, deadly partially hydrogenated oil. Any fats that escaped being transmogrified in the hydrogenation process are now subjected to the deep frying process. It’s a miracle that any of the unsaturated fats escape being transmogrified, if any of them do.

What You Can Do

For starters, read food labels and avoid anything that contains the words "hydrogenated". That means partially hydrogenated oils, hydrogenated oils, or anything of that kind (and mono-diglycerides, as well).

Note:
In 2006, a new FDA regulation takes effect that requires manufacturers to list the amount of trans fats on their product labels. Much as I would like to tell you that you can simply look for "0% trans fats" on the label, it would be useless for you to do so. The FDA wanted to put the words, "Warning: Trans fats may be dangerous to your health" on the labels–the same warning that first appeared on cigarettes–but the industry wouldn’t let them. And the way the labeling law works, the product can contain a significant percentage of trans fat, and still claim "0%". Simply put, the labeling law is nearly useless. For more information, see What’s Wrong with Trans Fat Labels?

When eating out, avoid deep-fried foods at all costs, and pretend you’re allergic to wheat. (You probably are! Something like 50% of the population is. See What’s Wrong with Wheat?) And when you avoid wheat you stay away from both partially hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup–another deadly ingredient in the American food supply that is rarely used in other countries–except where American corporations are involved.

If you follow those steps, you will do a good job of protecting yourself. But there is a simple thing you can do to help protect others, as well:

When you see a food that contains partially hydrogenated oils (especially if it claims to be healthy), put it back on the shelf upside down and backwards. (Sometimes it’s impossible to put things back upside down, so at least put them on the shelf backwards.)

To find out why this is an effective boycott strategy, see How to Carry Out an Effective Consumer Boycott.

The Legal Outlook

With any luck, the first lawsuits against "food" producers will begin in the next 10-20 years. The scientific knowledge has been available since the early 1990′s, at least, so there is no doubt they are fully aware of what they are doing. They have been ignoring the health effects for the sake of profit. Such behavior is both unethical and immoral. With luck, some day it will be illegal, as well.

Note:
When I originally wrote this article in 1998, I feared that as soon as the public became educated as to its danger, corporations would simply change the name of the substance or find something equally dangerous to replace it with. Fortunately, the FDA required labeling of trans fats, rather than partially hydrogenated oils. That forestalled the inevitable name change. But corporations have indeed found another process–one that may or may not be safer. To find out more, read What’s Wrong with Interesterified Oils?

Epilog, 2009: Food Industry Sneaks Trans Fats Back In

Once the FDA started requiring trans fats to be listed on the label, I thought that we were finally home free. Unfortunately, it turns out that the food industry is other options.

Mono- and Di-Glycerides

are designated as "emulsifiers" rather than fats, so the trans fats they contain "don’t count". (Until you ingest them.)

Resources

Oils and Essential Fatty Acids

Summary
Essential fatty acids are responsible for every metabolic operation in your body. These notes underscore the need to avoid refined and hydrogenated oils to maintain your health. Conclusion: You don’t need a low fat diet, you need a good fat diet.
[2200 words]

by Eric Armstrong

In 30 years of studying the literature on human nutrition, I studied vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and every other thing under the sunlight–including sunlight and oxygen. The last thing I thought to look at were fats. After all, I thought, it just sits there and gets burned. What’s there to know? Little did I know that fats are the most critical of all the nutrients–because essential fatty acids are responsible for every metabolic operation in your body.

Here, in bullet form, are the critical things you need to know about the fats in your diet:

After you remove the water from your body, more than 50% of what’s left is fatty acids. (The remainder is about 30% amino acids, then carbs & minerals.) So they’re important. They make up every cell membrane, all the hormones, prostaglandins, and eicosanoids. They combine with protein to form lipoprotein structures like hemoglobin, and they are what makes the brain and nervous system work. I mean, they are IMPORTANT. WAY more important than vitamins, minerals, or even amino acids. They are vital building blocks that make us what we are.
Budwig points out that they carry oxygen to the cell and into it. They combine with protein to form a tiny molecular “battery” that literally supplies the energy for brain and nervous system functions. They provide the free-electrons that the immune system uses to destroy invaders, and they’re responsible for the operation of hormones. They are also supposed to be involved in water metabolism, although so far I have found no other information on that subject.
We’re told that saturated fats aren’t that good for us, that monounsaturated fats are better, and that polyunsaturated fats are the best. Unfortunately, its not that simple.
Erdmann mentions that saturated fats (SaFas) aren’t great, but the body at least knows what to do with them. They’re eventually burned for energy. The long-chain saturated fats are stored first, and then burned when they’re needed. That’s why exercise is important. The shortest of the long-chain SaFas, the butyric acid in butter, burns readily. Longer SaFas like stearic acid in beef are harder to burn, but the body can get around to it, eventually. Long chain SaFas are also used for stability and rigidity in cell walls.
Fife and Enig provide a completely different perspective on saturated fats when they point out that medium chain saturated fats like lauric acid in coconut oil are metabolized in a completely different way. Rather than being stored as fat, they’re immediately burned for fuel, like sugar (which tends to reduce your sugar intake over time). And they’re only 6.7 calories per gram, instead of 9 calories per gram like long chain fats. Plus, they actually offload your immune system, by killing germs before they get inside the skin.
Still the most important oils for health are arguably the polyunsaturates (omega-6 family, like EPA found in fish) and superunsaturates (omega-3 family, like GLA found in seed oils). (The monounsaturated omega-9 fat in olive oil also plays a role.)
Because they are unsaturated, those fats are chemically active—they combine with oxygen so it can be transported by hemoglobin, and they make up the critical parts of cell membranes that, in addition to making the membranes flexible, transport oxygen through the cell walls. In other words, the chemical interactions they enable literally allow the cells to “breathe”. They’re make it possible to pass nutrients through cell walls, as well, which allows the cells to eat. Basically, unsaturated fats allow your cells to eat and breathe, so they’re critical for health.
But that only applies to natural oils, in their natural state. When you heat a food that contains fat, it’s not so bad. Since the fat is bound to a protein, the heat doesn’t hurt the oil very much. And when you extract an oil without heat, it’s not so bad, either, as long as you are careful to preserve it by protecting from heat, light, and oxygen. (Olive oil, sesame oil, and coconut oil are unique in that respect, in that they’re stable at room temperature.)
But when you extract and oil and then heat it–the results are pretty awful. Oils are heated when they’re refined and when they’re hydrogenated. The unsaturated fats are then twisted into something like 500 different varieties of trans fats–transmogrified fats that do not exist in nature.
Nothing in a million years of evolution has prepared your body to recognize, evade, or discard those fats. Your body knows what to do with saturated fats, but is incapable of dealing with trans fats. As a result, trans fats act as metabolic poisons, taking the place of fats your body needs and inhibiting the metabolic operations that are normally enabled by unsaturated fats.
Erdmann has two fantastic pages that describes the process of refining oils so they won’t spoil. The idea is basically to prevent them from “oxidizing”. That is, to prevent them from combining with oxygen. But that is exactly what they need to do be useful in our body!!!
Olives are heated for two hours at 120 degrees, then pressed in huge hydraulic presses, that generate intense heat, then pumped full of chemicals and then heated to drive out lecithin (which is a very active unsaturate). Then mixed with caustic soda and heated again. Then bleached and boiled at 110 degrees centigrade for half an hour. And then, because it smells so bad by this time, it is steam-distilled at close to 270 degrees centigrade. And this qualifies as “cold pressed” oil!!!!
The problem here is not simply that the food is heated and that enzymes are killed. The real problem is that results of the process produce fatty acid “look alikes” that your cells have never seen in its millions of years of evolution.
Erdmann describes the trans fats—fats that started out life as normal unsaturated fats, in a CIS configuration (that means they have a bend in them. The mnemonic I use is “CIS-turn” (pun). But when heated, they rotate, and they tend to rotate, straightening out into the trans (I think of “rapid trans-it—a railroad track) configuration. They are made up of the same components, but they are not chemically active!! But your body can’t distinguish them from the real thing, so they get used—in your cell walls, in your brain and nervous system, in your hemoglobin. They are literally and truly a metabolic poison, the same as carbon monoxide, though less immediately virulent.
Erasmus points to other results of modern processing methods, including cross-linked fatty acids, oxidized fatty acids, double-bond shifted fatty acids, fat-derived polymers, fat oxidation products, and other alter fatty acids, none of which occur in nature. (p. 328) In fact, early on the book he shows how you can diagram a natural fatty acid merely by knowing how many double bonds it has and where the first one starts—because they always occur in precise, undeviating intervals–in nature, that is, before they are refined into oblivion.
But that is not the only way we mess ourselves up. Frying in general, and commercial deep frying in particular, does a great job of messing up the unsaturates as well. (All oils are a mixture of unsaturates and saturates, so no matter what oil they are using, some level of poison results.
But the “hydrogenation” process is the worst. That process pumps hydrogen gas through an oil at temperatures of up to 210 degrees centigrade. That saturates it all, right. And pretty well kills it, too. “Partly unsaturated” is even worse. That stops the process before the fats are fully saturated, leaving even more trans fats and other deviant fats behind.
Note:
In the scientific literature, "trans fats" are only one variety of malformed fats. Erasmus lists the others. But in the general literature, "trans fats" means all of the adulterated, health-destroying pseudo-fats.
Erdmann states things beautifully on page 78, when he discusses what happens when trans fats take the place of CIS fats in the cell membrane: “the consequences of this substitution are severe: the integrity of the cell membrane will be reduced, admitting substances such as allergens, undigested proteins, viruses and even potential carcinogens.”
To summarize the problems:
- Cell integrity is violated in the lungs, so you are more susceptible to carcinogenic pollution and you intake oxygen less effectively.
- Cell integrity is violated in the digestive tract, so you are more allergic to things you eat, you ingest carcinogens, let a virus into your body, and ingest foods less effectively.
- Cell integrity is violated in every cell of your body, so they are more susceptible to the allergens and carcinogens that are getting in, and at the same time are less able to process insulin, absorb oxygen, or acquire nutrients they need.
- In addition, cellular operation is impaired in the brain, nervous system, hormonal messaging, and immune system as their functions are disrupted.
Jay Robb, who wrote The Fat Burning Diet, says that his eyesight improved after a year on a 40-30-30 diet (40% calories from carbohydrate, 30% from protein, 30% from fat. I believe that is because, as a part of his diet, he improved his health choices so that he avoided the dangerous fats mentioned above, and began ingesting unrefined oils. Erdmann points out that the CIS fats give the cell membranes flexibility – I suspect that my current need for glasses is simply the result of accumulated stiffness in the cornea stemming from many years of french fries, hydrogenated margarines, and foods like cookies made with partially hydrogenated fats. I have every reason to expect that my eyesight will improve, given a year or two with a good-fat diet.
Jay Robb also wrote that recovery from exercise improves significantly with a higher fat intake, because the fatty acids break down lactic acid. I am forever indebted to him for that comment, because that was what sparked my interest in this subject, and led to the discoveries I have described.

Conclusion

You don’t need a low fat diet, you need a good fat diet.

Avoiding Refined Oils and Finding Unrefined Varieties

The first and most important change you can make for your health is to avoid hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils. They’re in nearly everything, so you have to read food labels carefully–and even the FDA’s new requirement to list the amount of trans fats on food labels doesn’t completely solve the problem. (See Food Labels.)

Partially hydrogenated oils are also in most of the fast foods you eat: French fries, fried chicken, and other such foods are deep fried in partially hydrogenated oil at very high temperatures. That gives you a double whammy. Any fatty acids that were left intact after the oil was hydrogenated are destroyed in the deep frier. The breads are made with partially hydrogenated oils. Even the sauces and salad dressings are likely to contain it. (It’s difficult to be sure because there is no law that requires them to list their ingredients and display it in full public view.)

Once you’ve eliminated hydrogenated oils from your diet, the next important step is to eliminate refined oils. (They’re less important, but only because people don’t normally consume as much of them.) You then want to replace those oils with healthy, unrefined varieties.

I get unrefined vinegars and oils from the local whole foods store. In the south bay area (around San Jose and the San Francisco peninsula) there are four or five I can go to. Sometimes I have to go to all of them, but I can usually find whatever I want. They carry organic produce and aisles full of healthier-than normal food, so I guess I’m pretty lucky.

The oils I use are way more important than the vinegar. They are the unrefined seed oils, as recommended by Johanna Budwig – sesame and sunflower, primarily–and one called “Udo’s Best” that is created by Udo Erasmus, another noted authority in the field of fatty acid chemistry. I’ve also seen unrefined olive oil. If it doesn’t say "unrefined", the next best thing is extra virgin. Anything else doesn’t even qualify as good.

References

Books:

Fats That Can Save Your Life, Robert Erdmann, PhD
Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill, Udo Erasmus
Flax Oil as a True Aid Against Arthritis, Heart Infarction, Cancer, and Other Diseases, Dr. Johanna Budwig
Know Your Fats, Dr. Mary Enig
The Fat Burning Diet, Jay Robb
The Healing Miracles of Coconut Oil, Bruce Fife

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Dangers of Partially Hydrogenated Oils & Why Essential Fatty Acids

What’s Wrong with
Partially Hydrogenated Oils?

Why Fats are Important

What is Hydrogenation?

What’s Wrong with Hydrogenation?