Trans fatty acids and coronary heart disease

doi:10.1136/bmj.333.7561.214

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Robert Clarke (robert.clarke@ctsu.ox.ac.uk), honorary consultant in public health medicine,
Sarah Lewington, senior research fellow

Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit, Richard Doll Building, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF
Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit, Richard Doll Building, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF

Food labels should list these as well as cholesterol and saturated fat

Arecent systematic review by Mozaffarian and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine advocated that people should reduce or stop their dietary intake of trans fatty acids to minimise the related risk of coronary heart disease.1 Trans fatty acids—unsaturated fatty acids with at least one double bond in the trans molecular configuration—are produced by partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils. This is a process that converts vegetable oils into semisolid fats which have no known nutritional value but are widely used in margarines, in commercial cooking, and in manufactured foods.2

Reliable evidence for the effects of trans fatty acids and other types of fat on blood lipids comes from …