The next question was what, if anything, could be done about it. In 1913, Nikolay Anichkov offered the first ray of hope. Working in the Czar’s Military Medicine Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, Anichkov found that rabbits fed large quantities of milk and egg yolks—foods rich in cholesterol—developed atherosclerosis. He reasoned that heart disease could be controlled by diet. Eat less cholesterol, he said, and you’ll live longer.
By the mid-1950s, Ancel Keys argued that cholesterol wasn’t the only problem. Keys studied people’s diets in seven different countries. He found that residents of Japan and Crete had very little heart disease, while those living in Finland—where the amount of fat in the diet was greater—suffered a higher incidence. He urged Americans to restrict their fat intake, becoming the first person to use the term “heart-healthy diet.” Despite the clarity of his recommendation, Keys admitted that “direct evidence on the effect of diet on human atherosclerosis is very little and likely to remain so for some time.”
Unlike Anichkov, whose work had little influence, Keys had clout. He chaired the International Society of Cardiology for the World Health Organization, was consultant to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, and, along with his wife, wrote several best-selling books on diet and disease. In 1961, Ancel Keys appeared on the cover of Time magazine urging Americans to eat less fat and less cholesterol. That same year, the American Heart Association set a recommended limit of 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol a day. Because a single egg contains about 200 milligrams of cholesterol, egg consumption dropped 30 percent. “In America, we no longer fear God,” said David Kritchevsky, a scientist at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. “We fear fat.”
Although scientific data on the relationship between fat consumption and human health remained, at best, ambiguous, the United States federal government was determined to impose clarity. In 1968, Senator George McGovern launched the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. McGovern and his wife had recently tried diet guru Nathan Pritikin’s low-fat diet and exercise program. Although McGovern had bailed out on the diet quickly, he remained committed to its mantra.
In 1977, McGovern’s committee published its unprecedented and, according to one historian, “revolutionary” report. What made it revolutionary was that it was written by a group of political activists with no specific training or expertise in the field of nutrition. The author of the report was Nick Mottern, a labor reporter for the Providence Journal. Mottern had no background in science, nutrition, or human health. So, he turned to the one man he believed could help him decide what diet was right for the American public: Mark Hegsted, a Harvard School of Public Health nutritionist who unconditionally embraced the benefits of restricting dietary fats, even though he admitted that it was an extreme position. Mottern’s report, titled “Dietary Goals for the United States,” stated that Americans should cut their total fat intake to less than 30 percent of total calories.
The McGovern committee guidelines would have quietly died the death they deserved had it not been for Carol Tucker Foreman, a consumer activist who had recently been appointed U.S. Department of Agriculture assistant secretary of Food and Consumer Services. Foreman decided to elevate the committee’s recommendations to official government policy. Undeterred by the lack of clarity from scientific studies, Foreman marshaled forth. “I have to eat and feed my children three times a day,” she told a group of scientists, “and I want you to tell me what your best sense of the data is right now.” Unfortunately, the “best sense of the data” depended on whom you asked. Scientists just didn’t know enough to make a clear recommendation. But the USDA recommendations were clear, even if the data weren’t. Restriction of dietary fat became official government policy.
After Mottern’s report was made public, McGovern’s staffers decided that it might be a good idea to get input from more than one scientist. So, they opened up their committee hearings to others. One of the first to appear was Robert Levy, a senior scientist from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Levy testified that no one really knew whether lowering cholesterol or fat intake would do anything to prevent heart disease, and that his institute was in the midst of a $300 million study to find out. But Levy also knew that the horse was out of the barn. “The good senators came out with the guidelines and then called on us to get advice,” he lamented.
Next to argue against the committee’s report was Pete Ahrens, a metabolism researcher at New York’s famous Rockefeller Institute, who, in 1969, had headed a committee that came to the same conclusions as Robert Levy. Even the American Medical Association weighed in, protesting that the diet proposed by McGovern’s committee had the “potential for harmful effects.” But it was too late. According to Gary Taubes, in a Science magazine article titled, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat,” “It was George McGovern’s [Committee]—and, to be precise, a handful of McGovern’s staff members—that almost single-handedly changed nutritional policy in this country and initiated the process of turning the dietary fat hypothesis into dogma.” Although they didn’t know it at the time, Americans were now unwitting test subjects in a national experiment to see if restricting dietary fat reduced the incidence of heart disease.
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PERHAPS NO PRODUCT SUFFERED government restrictions more than butter, whose origins date back to the time that humans domesticated animals, about 10,000 years ago. Butter is made by separating cream from milk and churning it into a solid, which is naturally a light yellow color. When Keys and McGovern made their definitive, if ill-founded, recommendations, they caused Americans to prefer a product that was first commissioned in 1869 by Napoleon III of France. Napoleon needed something cheaper than butter to feed his army. The first to step forward was a French chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès, who invented something he called oleomargarine. Unlike butter, which was made from animal fat, margarine was made from vegetable oils. Also unlike butter, margarine was stark white, not light yellow. Cheaper, but similar in taste and texture to butter, margarine soon became one of the most popular food products in the world.
In 1886, the National Dairy Association in the United States fought back, influencing the federal government to pass the Oleomargarine Act, which imposed a tax on anyone selling margarine. To avoid the tax, some margarine makers dyed their product yellow and sold it as butter. Incensed, the dairy industry used its influence to prohibit margarine makers from dying their product. Manufacturers responded by selling margarine with a yellow dye on the side. If consumers wanted their margarine to be yellow, all they had to do was put it in a bowl and add the dye themselves. Three states—Vermont, New Hampshire, and West Virginia—went one step further, passing laws that margarine had to be dyed pink. The margarine tax laws were repealed in 1950, the dye laws in 1955. (Major dairy states like Minnesota and Wisconsin didn’t repeal their dye laws until 1967.) Now, margarine could be sold as a yellow, spreadable product free of a federal tax. Advertisers were quick to promote its benefits over butter.
In 1911, the average American ate about 19 pounds of butter a year compared with only 1 pound of margarine. By 1957, with margarine now being offered as the “heart-healthy” alternative, Americans were eating 8.5 pounds of margarine a year, about the same as butter. “The massive advertising of health claims for margarine transformed a generally disreputable product of inferior quality and flavor into a great commercial success,” wrote William Rothstein, in his book Public Health and the Risk Factor. Even Eleanor Roosevelt jumped in. “That’s what I spread on my toast,” she said in a 1959 television commercial for Good Luck margarine. By 1976, margarine consumption had increased to 12 pounds a year, three times that of butter. But despite the switch from butter to the supposedly “heart-healthy” margarine, the incidence of heart disease in the United States continued to rise. It took decades for policy makers to understand why margarine was actually the “heart-unhealthy” alternative.
During the next 20 years, three major studies involving 300
,000 people and costing about $100 million determined the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease. The answer: There wasn’t any. Nonetheless, despite the clarity of these studies, official government policy remained unchanged. Walter Willett, a Harvard epidemiologist who had headed one of the studies, was incensed. “Scandalous,” he remarked. “They say, ‘You really need a high level of proof to change the recommendations,’ which is ironic because they never had a high level of proof to set them.”
Ancel Keys and the McGovern committee had been wrong about dietary fats because they had assumed that all fats were the same. They hadn’t accounted for the different types of fats, specifically, saturated fats, unsaturated fats, cis fats, and—most important—trans fats. In the years that followed, Americans would pay a high price for their ignorance.
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TO UNDERSTAND WHERE Keys and McGovern had gone wrong, we’re going to need a brief refresher course in high school chemistry for the few people who might have forgotten it. Just kidding. Everyone’s forgotten it. You forget it the minute the test is over. But to understand what words like “saturated” and “unsaturated” and “trans fats” mean, we need to understand some of the chemistry behind them. It’s really not that hard. So hang in there.
Fats are composed of three different types of atoms: carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). Carbon atoms, which form the backbone of fats, have four binding sites (areas where one atom attaches to another). If all four sites are bound, then the carbon atom’s binding sites are said to be saturated. The fat shown below is a saturated fat. Foods rich in saturated fats include butter, lard, coconut oil, palm oil, mayonnaise, and fish oils; dairy products like cream, cheeses, milk, sour cream, and ice cream; and processed meats like bacon, sausage, salami, steak, ham, ground beef, and luncheon meats.
Saturated fat
Sometimes, however, a carbon atom will share two binding sites with another carbon atom (such as in the carbon atoms pictured in bold in the example below). Because it’s still possible for these carbon atoms to share one of their binding sites with another atom (like a hydrogen atom), the fat is said to be unsaturated. The fat shown below is an unsaturated fat. Foods rich in unsaturated fats include olive oil, salmon, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, avocados, olives, fatty fish, margarine, natural peanut butter, and pumpkin, sunflower, flax, and chia seeds.
Unsaturated Fat
By the early 1980s, when the relative quantities of these two different types of fats were clear, several studies had shown that saturated fats increased the risk of heart disease. These studies gave birth to the notion that unsaturated fats were good and saturated fats were evil. In response, two groups made it their mission to eliminate saturated fats from the American diet. It wasn’t until much later that Americans realized what they’d done wrong.
In 1984, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) launched its “saturated fat attack,” targeting companies that fried or baked foods using animal fats and tropical oils that were rich in saturated fats (like coconut oil and palm oil). A year later, Phil Sokolof—after suffering a near fatal heart attack—launched the National Heart Savers Association (NHSA), spending $15 million of his own money to force companies to eliminate saturated fats from fast foods. In 1988, Sokolof sent thousands of letters to companies urging them to stop using saturated fats. When his letters were ignored, he took out full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. “Who is poisoning America?” his advertisements blared, “Food processors are by using saturated fats!” The text that followed was no less subtle. “We have contacted all of the major food processors beseeching them to stop using these potentially dangerous ingredients…Our pleas have gone unanswered. Obviously these companies have more pressing priorities than your health. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE…We implore you. Do not buy products containing coconut or palm oil. YOUR LIFE MAY BE AT STAKE.”
CSPI’s “saturated fat attack” and NHSA’s letter-writing campaign targeted every major company that prepared foods using shortenings or oils high in saturated fats, including Archway, Borden, Frito-Lay, General Foods, Hardee’s, Heinz, Hostess, Keebler, Kellogg’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lance, McDonald’s, McKee Baking Company, Nabisco, Pepperidge Farm, Pillsbury, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Ralston Purina, Roman Meal, Roy Rogers, Specialty Bakers, Stouffer’s, Sunshine, Taco Bell, and Wendy’s. By the late 1980s, virtually every major cookbook and every reputable dietitian promoted diets low in saturated fats, efforts that were wholeheartedly supported by the FDA, the World Health Organization, the USDA, and the National Institutes of Health. The solution to the problem of heart disease appeared to be obvious: Replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats. Americans were told to eat margarine instead of butter. Unfortunately, margarine contained a type of fat (trans fats) that was far more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined.
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TO UNDERSTAND WHAT TRANS FATS ARE, let’s go back to our description of an unsaturated fat. In the diagram below, look at the carbon atoms shown in bold. The hydrogen atoms connected to those two carbon atoms are both on the same side. This is called being in the “cis configuration.” Cis, in Latin, means “on this side of.” When both hydrogen atoms are on the same side, they repel each other, causing a bend in the molecule. This bend makes it harder to stack one molecule on top of another. Molecules that don’t stack well are hard to crystallize or, said another way, they are hard to make into a solid. As a result, cis unsaturated fats are invariably liquid oils, like canola and sunflower oils.
Cis-Unsaturated Fat
Sometimes, as shown in the example on this page, the hydrogen atoms of an unsaturated fat are on the opposite side. Now the hydrogen atoms are said to be in a trans configuration. Trans, in Latin, means “on the other side.” When hydrogen atoms are on the opposite side, the molecule is straight. Now it’s much easier to stack one molecule on top of another. Molecules that stack neatly and tightly are easy to crystallize, converting a liquid into a solid. That’s why common vegetable shortenings, even though they are made of vegetable oils, stay solid in a can on your kitchen shelf.
For the most part, large quantities of trans fats are not found in nature. They are created when hydrogen atoms are purposely added to unsaturated vegetable oils, a process called hydrogenation. The end product is typically referred to as a “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.” The designation partially means that the product isn’t completely saturated or, said another way, is still unsaturated. It also means that the product is loaded with trans fats.
Trans-Unsaturated Fat (or Trans Fat)
Americans first became aware of unsaturated fats containing large quantities of trans fats in the 1980s. But in truth, these products were actually born more than a hundred years earlier in the form of one of America’s most popular cooking products.
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ON FEBRUARY 27, 1901, Wilhelm Normann became the first person to hydrogenate liquid oils, a process he called “fat hardening.” On August 14, 1902, Normann was awarded German patent #141,029. Trans fats were born. One year later, after Normann was granted a patent in England, Joseph Crosfield & Sons built a large-scale manufacturing plant in Warrington, England. By 1909, Crosfield was producing 6.6 million pounds of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils every year. Five years later, more than 20 plants worldwide were hydrogenating vegetable oils into a solid state—all loaded with trans fats.
The same year that Joseph Crosfield & Sons started mass-producing solid oils, Procter & Gamble acquired the U.S. rights to Normann’s patent, originally planning to use it to make soaps and candles. Soon Procter & Gamble scientists figured out how to use Normann’s method to convert cottonseed oil from a liquid to a solid. When he realized that his company had created a cooking product like no other, William Procter walked into the office of a man who had been selling cooking oils for most of his life, tossed a hard white block onto his desk, and said, “There is some cottonseed o
il.” They called it Crisco, a contraction of Crystallized cottonseed oil.
For many reasons, the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats in Crisco were superior to every other cooking oil or shortening ever invented: (1) Trans fats are more stable when exposed to oxygen, so they have much longer shelf lives than animal fats like butter; (2) trans fats burn only at extremely high temperatures, so cooking oils don’t cause much smoke and don’t need to be changed as frequently—a godsend to any employee who works all day over a fryer; (3) trans fats have a neutral flavor, so they don’t interfere with the taste of any food; (4) trans fats look so much like butter that they can easily replace it; and (5) trans fats are extraordinarily cheap. Starting in the 1930s, they were made from oils left over from crushing soybeans used to make animal feed. Finally, because of their variations in texture, structure, lubrication, and aeration, semisolid fats like Crisco allowed bakers to make cakes fluffier, cookies crumblier, crackers crispier, pies flakier, chicken crunchier, and croissants more delicate.
Procter & Gamble knew they had a gold mine on their hands. They sold Crisco attached to cookbooks that contained a variety of recipes, all of which required Crisco for baking and frying. They marketed Crisco with phrases like, “It’s all vegetable! It’s digestible!” and “An Absolutely New Product, a Scientific Discovery Which Will Affect Every Kitchen in America.” Also, because Crisco is kosher, they promoted it with this tagline: “The Hebrew Race has been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco.” In the 1940s, animal fats like butter accounted for two-thirds of all fat consumption in the United States; by the early 1960s, with the increasing use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils containing trans fats, that ratio had reversed.
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