The Obesity Epidemic: What Caused It? How Can We Stop It?

by Zoe Harcombe

The ultimate irony is that an entire industry, worth five billion dollars in the USA (2008) alone,[253] has been built on destroying the reputation of butter and then trying to reproduce the substance. Butter is mostly saturated fat, naturally solid at room temperature and it has a natural colour. The first part of the imitation process is to take liquid oils, usually cheap and low quality vegetable oils, and then turn them into solid fats in some way. Hydrogenation is one way, increasingly less acceptable nowadays but still done. In this process the oils are heated and pressurised and hydrogen gas is added, along with a catalyst, like nickel, to produce the chemical reaction. This helps the oils to ‘accept’ the hydrogen atoms that they have been ‘longing for’. Of course, the hydrogen atoms don’t end up exactly where they ‘should’. Some end up on the wrong side of the structure and you end up not with a saturated fat, but with a completely new fat completely alien to the body.