A team from Harvard School of Public Health analyzed 83 reformulated products from supermarkets and restaurants, and found little cause for alarm.
"We found that in over 80 brand name, major national products, the great majority took out the trans fat and did not just replace it with saturated fat, suggesting they are using healthier fats to replace the trans fat,"said lead researcher Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of epidemiology.
Trans fats -- created by adding hydrogen to vegetable oil to make it firmer -- are cheap to produce and long-lasting, making them ideal for fried foods. They also add flavor that consumers like, but are known to decrease HDL, or good, cholesterol, and increase LDL, or bad, cholesterol, which raises the risk for heart attack, stroke and diabetes, according to the American Heart Association.
The report, published in the May 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, found no increase in the use of saturated fats in reformulated foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants, Mozaffarian said.
