I suspect that many of you may well have fallen behind in your reading and have missed one or two recent editions of the New England Journal of Medicine.
It’s a pity, but I will take this opportunity to direct your attention to Volume 337, Number 21. There you will find a pithy article entitled Dietary fat intake and the risk of coronary heart disease in women.
The researchers looked at a population of more than 80,000 women over a period of 14 years. Their conclusions were interesting, especially for those whose business is based on milk processing. In the Anglo-Saxon world at the moment there is a general feeling that low fat is good, high fat is bad. This has led the fashionable and the health conscious (work out for yourself where one group starts and the other ends) to move to low fat, high carbohydrate diets.
This has had unexpected side effects in that anyone who moves onto this kind of diet finds that his or her body cuts down the level of high density cholesterol in circulation and increases the amount of fasting levels of triglycerides in an attempt to deal with the problems the new diet throws up. These automatic responses are now thought to place the body at higher risk of coronary heart disease than the original higher fat diet.
Another thing the researchers found was that, while saturated fatty acids were a risk factor and could lead to coronary heart disease, unsaturated fatty acids weren’t exactly risk free either. The traditional polyunsaturated and mono-unsaturated fatty acids were less risky than saturated fatty acids but trans-unsaturated fatty acids actually put consumers at greater risk than saturated fatty acids.
Now you may well ask why this is of importance to an honest purveyor of dairy products. Well the answer is simple, if a fat-based product is stiff enough to be spread on bread without running through it and dripping onto the plate then it is saturated fatty acid-based. If it can be poured at room temperature and is kept in bottles then it is rich in polyunsaturates.
Now the problem for manufacturers trying to produce vegetable oil-based products to replace butter is that people tend to be a bit old fashioned and prefer to spread butter on their bread rather than using it as a dip. So the chemists were called in and they pointed out that if you increased the proportion of trans- unsaturated fatty acids it stiffened the product and it would then spread rather than pour. It also had the advantage in that you could still sell the product as high in unsaturated fatty acids and vegetable-based.
So, for once, the dairy industry can see science giving its rivals a hard time. Butter substitutes which are cheaper than butter will almost certainly contain high levels of trans-unsaturated fatty acids and will therefore present a greater threat to health than butter. Butter substitutes which do not contain the offending trans-unsaturated fatty acids will either contain a lot of animal fat (sounds better than lard) or butter. For those who want their butter to spread straight from the fridge there shouldn’t be too much of a problem as it is not desirable to include trans-unsaturated fatty acids in the product anyway.
Ironically enough, those vegetable oils which are least refined and are used for cooking, such as soya oil or corn oil, are OK. It is just that the more you mess about with vegetable oils, the more manufacturing and the more processes they go through, the more unhealthy they become. Funny