Word: mcdonald
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Even as a doctor, I sometimes have difficulty remembering which are the good fatty acids and which are the bad. So when McDonald's announced last week that it was changing its cooking oil--reducing trans-fatty acids 48% and increasing polyunsaturated fats 167%--I had to pull out an old textbook to make sure this was a good thing. It turns out it is. And more important, it's a step in the right direction for the fast-food industry...
...McDonald's, Burger King and the rest rely heavily on fatty acids to fry their wares. This is not entirely bad. Fatty acids are the building blocks of dietary fats, an essential part of the human diet. Dietary fats contain a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids (the difference: saturated fats carry a full quota of hydrogen atoms in their chemical structure, and unsaturated fats do not). Such products as tallow, lard and butter are saturated fats, whereas those like soybean, canola, olive, cottonseed, corn and other vegetable oils are unsaturated. Saturated fats are associated with increases...
...saturated fats raise ldl cholesterol, Weiss explains, "trans fats appear to both raise bad (LDL) cholesterol and lower the good (HDL) cholesterol." The FDA does not currently require vendors to label foods for trans-fatty-acid content, but the agency has new rules in the works that would force McDonald's and others to do just that...
...Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald may be reached at mcdonal@fas.harvard.edu...
...toxic environment," says Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale University Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. "Physical activities have been engineered out of day-to-day life, and the food environment grows worse by the day. We took Joe Camel off the billboards, but we celebrate Ronald McDonald...