He squints into the camera. “I’m just going to give you an idea of how this food is breaking down in your body.”
After 10 weeks, all the food is unrecognisable, except for the McDonald’s fries. “It looks like we bought them yesterday,” observes Spurlock. How long they would have actually lasted remains unknown because—shortly thereafter—an intern mistakenly threw them out.
This miracle of nature is made possible by hydrogenated vegetable oil, known also as trans fats or saturated oil. Because of its economic advantages, it is used in McDonald’s deep-fryers as well as in most areas of industrial food production. So-called because of their molecular formation, trans fats have recently been banned in New York City. The only European country in which they are legally prohibited is Denmark, which allows only trace amounts.
The reason for the ban is simple: hydrogenated vegetable oil can kill you. “Trans fatty acids are sufficiently similar to natural fats that the body readily incorporates them into the cell membrane; once there, their altered chemical structure creates havoc with thousands of necessary chemical reactions,” reported an on-line article, ‘The Oiling of America,’ by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. Enzymes in the body get tied up trying to deal with these fats, an arduous task that results in the neglect of other fats in the body. The ultimate consequence of this can be “a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death.” Hydrogenation was discovered in 1901. It was cheap, lasted virtually forever and, at the time, was believed to be healthier because it was extracted from the ‘good cholesterol’ of vegetables. Half a century would pass before the detrimental effects of trans fats became evident.
“Many important scientific studies indicate that a three percent increase in the consumption of trans fats can produce a 29 percent increase in cardiovascular disease,” physician Vicente Bertomeu, president of the Arterial Hypertension Section of the Spanish Society of Cardiology, told Metropolitan. “It’s a fat that is more dangerous because it’s treated to be more stable and more soluble. It’s homogenous and activates certain flavours. One other important reason trans fats are used in industrial food production is because the foods expire much later.”
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