Natural Trans Fats

I was Confused. My Confusion has Lessened.

Everyone without exception agrees that trans-fats are bad news, and there even seems to be good reason to believe it as well, which is nice.

But there are those that say that ‘natural’ trans-fats in dairy are harmless.

I was confused about this, because if the source of a chemical affects its properties then that is a fundamental discovery in physics. Nutrition “scientists” do not, as a rule, make important discoveries in fundamental physics.

Although it important not to rule out the theoretical possibility.

And also I was confused because what are the trans-fats doing in dairy produce in the first place? Neither mammal nor plant biology has much use for trans-fats. And maybe some get created accidentally, there is always randomness, but they should be in undetectably low amounts if so.

Dispelling this confusion, once I noticed it, was a simple matter of checking wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fats

Trans fats occur in meat and dairy products from ruminants. For example, butter contains about 3% trans fat.^[10] These naturally occurring trans fats include conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) and vaccenic acid. They arise from the action of bacteria in the rumen. In contrast to industrially produced trans fats, the bacterial produced versions exist only as a few isomers. Polyunsaturated fats are toxic to the rumen-based bacteria, which induces the latter to detoxify the fats by changing some cis-double bonds to trans. As industrial sources of trans fats are eliminated, increased attention focuses on ruminant derived trans fats.

Which I read as:

If you put sodding seed oils in sodding cow food then it actually poisons their gut bacteria, which turn them into transfats as a defence because they’re less poisonous to the bacteria. The cows then absorb the trans-fats.

Something tells me that cows that eat grass, as cows should, do not have much in the way of ‘natural’ trans-fats in their milk. A little, perhaps. Grasses have seeds.

I would be amazed if the resulting trans-fats were anything other than bad news.

Factory farming is a moral obscenity. But it is also a horror that poisoning the world.

Even in my home hills, where happy-looking cows and sheep wander around eating grass in fields and are the principal reason why I am not a vegetarian, there are monsters building vast sheds, in which they are planning obscenities and cruelties.

I trust that they will get their reward at the end of days.

It is a vain hope, but a man can dream, and I dream of seeing these monsters helpless in the power of a superior intelligence which is optimizing for something other than their welfare.

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And on my travels today I have also seen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccenic_acid

Vaccenic acid is also found in human orbitofrontal cortex of patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Good Lord, I wonder what could be going on there?

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As a further postscript, I have been in the habit of blaming Americans for finding ways to turn inedible horrors into edible horrors, but it turns out that in the case of ‘fat hardening’ it was the Germans.

We copied the Germans. At first in Warrington.

Truly I say to you, can any good thing come out of Warrington?

And then the Americans copied us, and Crisco, the root of all evil, was humbly born in America from virgin cottonseed oil.