VI. THE LATEST ON THE TRANS FATTY ACIDS

Both the United States and Canada will soon require labeling of the trans fatty acids, which will put coconut oil in a more competitive position than it has been in the past decade. A fear of the vegetable oil manufacturers has always been that they would have to label trans fatty acids. The producers of trans fatty acids have relied on the anti-saturated fat crusade to protect their markets. However, the latest research on saturated fatty acids and trans fatty acids shows the saturated fatty acids coming out ahead in the health race.

It has taken this last decade, from 1988 to 1998, to see changes in perception. During this period, the trans fatty acids have taken a deserved drubbing. Research reports from Europe have been emerging since the seminal report by Mensink and Katan in 1990 that the trans fatty acids raised the low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and lowered the high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol in serum. This has been confirmed by studies in the U.S. (Judd et al 1994, Khosla and Hayes 1996, Clevidence 1997).

In 1990, the lipids research group at the University of Maryland published a paper (Enig et al 1990) correcting some of the erroneous data sponsored by the food industry in the 1985 review by the Life Sciences Research Office of Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (LSRO-FASEB) (Senti 1985) of the trans fatty acids.

Also, in 1993, a group of researchers at Harvard University, led by Professor Walter Willett, reported a positive relationship between the dietary intake of the trans fatty acids and coronary heart disease in a greater than 80,000 cohort of nurses who had been followed by the School of Public Health at Harvard University for more than a decade.

Pietinen and colleagues (1997) evaluated the findings from the large cohort of Finnish men who were being studied for a cancer prevention study. After controlling for the appropriate variables including several coronary risk factors, the authors observed a significant positive association between the intake of trans fatty acids and the risk of death from coronary disease. There was no association between intakes of saturated fatty acids, or dietary cholesterol and the risk of coronary deaths. This is another example of the differences between the effects of the trans fatty acids and the saturated fatty acids and further challenge to the dietary cholesterol hypothesis.