Re: A Fatty Transition by Carl Milsted

Isofat isn't "food", and it's ridiculous to suggest restaurant patrons should take a transesterification apparatus and gas chromatograph to the restaurant to exercise their free choice what to eat. As you write, most people can tell when they're smoking tobacco or cannabis, or are in the vicinity of lawndart tossing.

And no, I don't support banning PHVOs. Just don't allow them to be labeled as "food". Grease wrestlers and cosmetic makers seem to like them.

As unsaturated fats are pi unsaturated rather than cyclic, in modern nomenclatural convention /cis/ and /trans/ don't apply to them at all.

Trans Fat?

The term "trans fat" is rather ambiguous, and not entirely correct in view of recent advances in chemical nomenclature, which prefer to restrict it to cyclic structures. A better term for the harmful sort of unsaturated fat produced on exposure to hydrogenation catalysts such as Raney nickel is "E-fat", where 'E' stands for the German preposition "entgegen" (opposite). Since that may be a bit much for readers other than organic chemists, perhaps they should be called "isofats" in reporting. We wouldn't want readers to think they refer to curiousities such as glyceryltrichrysanthemate. :) The 9,10-methylene- hexadecanoic acid allegedly found in mitochondrial membranes appears to be predominantly cis, but is likely nearly as irrelevant as chrysanthemates to the instant concern. Please be aware that wikipedia authors appear stuck in the dark ages on this, as does the US Food and Drug Administration.

-- Scott Bergeson