Last we heard, the once ubiquitous trans fats had mostly disappeared from packaged cookies, muffins and french fries.

  That's what we reported back in November 2013, when the Food and Drug Administration announced it was intending to ban partially hydrogenated vegetable oils from all food products. The proposed ban seemed prudent, since eating foods with trans fats has been linked to heart disease, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that an FDA ban could prevent an additional 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year and as many as 20,000 heart attacks in that period.

  But the FDA has yet to issue a final rule requiring food companies to eliminate trans fats entirely. In the meantime, researchers decided to find out just how many products still contain them.

  Turns out it's more than you might think. While many food companies have found affordable alternatives to partially hydrogenated oil, 1 in 10 packaged foods still contain it, according to researchers at the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

  "A lot people think it's out of the food supply, but it's still in a lot of places," Christine Johnson Curtis, an assistant commissioner at the department and an author of the study, tells The Salt. It appeared Thursday in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.——http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2014/14_0161.htm

  To figure out how stubborn many food companies have been about not removing trans fats, Curtis and her colleagues analyzed a database of 4,340 top-selling packaged foods in the U.S., including baked goods, frozen foods and snacks. The scientists compared the list of actual ingredients to the nutrition label on each package.

Of the products found to still contain the problematic oil, 84 percent were labeled as having 0 grams of it. The FDA allows companies to put 0 grams on the label even if there's up to0.5 grams of trans fat in the food.

  That may not seem like a lot, but Curtis says that even consuming low levels of trans fats could pose a health risk. "We have established that there's just no benefit to consuming them — they're not healthy for anyone," she says. "But [with a zero-gram label], consumers can't know how much they're consuming, and if they're eating multiple products over the course of the day labeled zero trans fat, it could add up."

  Of all the food products the researchers looked at, cookies and crackers were the most likely to still contain the oil.

  The FDA has not indicated when it will issue a final rule, but Johnson Curtis says she's hopeful food companies will eventually be required to eliminate trans fats entirely.

via：http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/08/28/343971652/trans-fats-linger-stubbornly-in-the-food-supply

    最近我们听说，曾经无所不在的反式脂肪已经几乎从饼干，松饼这类包装食品和炸薯条中消失了。

    2013年11月我们曾经报道过FDA（食品与药物管理局）宣布说他们正打算禁止在食用产品中出现部份氢化植物油。这项禁令看起来是正确的，因为一直以来反式脂肪就与心脏病挂钩，而且疾病控制和预防中心曾估计FDA的这项禁令每年可以阻止7,000多人死于心脏病，以及预防20,000多次心脏病发作。

    但是FDA还没有发布要求食品公司彻底消除反式脂肪的最终规定。与此同时，研究者决定查明到底还有多少食品含有反式脂肪。

    结果显示比人们想象的还要多。纽约市健康与心理卫生局的研究表明，尽管很多食品公司已经找到了价格实惠的部分氢化植物油的替代品，但是每十个包装食品中就有一个包含反式脂肪。

    “很多人以为食品中已经不存在反式脂肪了，但其实还有很多。”Christine Johnson Curtis，纽约市健康与心理卫生局的一名助理专员说，她也是周四刊登在《预防慢性病杂志》上的这项研究的作者之一。——http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2014/14_0161.htm

    为了搞清楚这些食品公司在使用反式脂肪上有多么顽固，Curtis和她的同事分析了4,340个在美国销量最高的包装食品，速冻食品和快餐。他们把每个包装上的营养标签所列出的成分与食品中真正的成分进行对比后发现，在标注零反式脂肪的食品中，有84%其实是包含反式脂肪的。因为FDA允许每份反式脂肪含量少于0.5克的食品标注其含量为零。

    这也许看起来并不多，但是Curtis说即使是少量的反式脂肪也会导致健康风险。“我们现在已经确定食用它是没有任何好处的——对任何人都不好。”她说，“但是营养标签上写了零反式脂肪，消费者也不知道他们在不知不觉中食用了多少，而且如果他们每天要吃各种各样有这样标签的食品，反式脂肪叠加起来也很多。”

    在研究者调查的所有食品中，饼干是含有反式脂肪最多的。

    FDA还没有表明什么时候会出台一项最终的禁令，但是Johnson Curtis说她希望反式脂肪会在食品中完全消失。

After reading this article on The Salt, I can’t help but thinking about the current food situation in China. Although the problem of trans fat is serious, it seems trifle when compared with decolorized waste oil here. 

Now we have so much food safety issues and most of them are more severe than that in the US. There is a snack street just beside my campus, everyday there are hundreds of students and teachers buy food there, not caring about what the food materials are or how dirty the foodstuff can be. What’s more disappointing, neither our university nor the local government take any action to expel the not licensed stalls.

I understand that our country is trying its best to eliminate such problems, but the relevant departments should try harder. Thinking of the past, Chinese people have suffered too much of war, poverty, hunger, stress, pollution, and disease, but are still struggling for a brighter future of the country. All these people deserve to eat at ease.