2006-09-22

As you've no doubt heard by now — you know, unless you've spent the last five years under a rock, in a cave, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears — hydrogenated fats (or "trans fat" as most people call them now) are really bad for you. Like they're the worst kinds of fat you can put in your system. (If you missed out on the terminology, this is why suddenly everyone was saying "Stop eating margerine. You're better off just sticking with butter.")

What you may or may not have heard is that it's not enough to just not use the hydrogenated fats. Some fats are highly unstable under heat and if you use them for cooking, they'll hydrogenate themselves, leaving you with exactly the same trans fats you'd get if you just had the hydrogenated corn oil.

The most stable fats, the ones least likely to oxidize, are saturated fats. Things like animal fats: lard, tallow, and butter. And of the vegetable fats, coconut oil is the highest in saturated fat, and therefore the most stable at high heats.

Okay, knowing all that, rewind about 10 or 15 years. What was the big public health nuisance? Movie popcorn. The flavor of the month for the nanny state types desperate to ruin everyone's fun was saturated fat. And you can imagine their horror when they discovered that movie theaters were cooking their popcorn with... coconut oil.

So the movie theaters capitulated, and they stopped using coconut oil and instead started using... hydrogenated corn oil. That's right. Switching to trans fats was considered the healthy alternative at the time.

So how long do you think until someone launches a campaign against movie popcorn to get the trans fats out of it? I wonder what they'll switch to?

And how long it'll take to switch from that to something else? My guess is in 10 years they'll switch back to coconut oil. Which everyone says was way tastier than the corn oil they're using now.