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Comment by meursault334 | Hacker News Reader

The argument that we could end artificial trans fat with tons of sugar is a straw man. The most sensible replacement which in most cases only affects the cost and shelf-life of food is either healthy or less-damaging fats.

Banning trans fat may be bad for orangutans but it's good for consumers' health.

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What possible corporation out there would intentionally increase direct and indirect financial costs, lowering profits, merely to not increase sugar/hfcs use to lure people into buying their product?

Highly processed foods are now going to be much less greasy/oily and much more sugary to attract consumers. You need to do "something" get people to eat junk food, and if its not going to be the oily/greasy axis of evil it will be the HFCS/sugar axis of evil.

Maybe 1% of the market, the green/organic or at least greenwashing segment, will increase prices and switch to saturated fats and dramatically lower shelf life, but on a population wide scale that is a rounding error.

Higher carbs means more fat people and more diabetes and fat related illness including heart issues. So we're trading large number of heart disease related deaths for rather optimistically a slightly smaller number of obesity related deaths. Its probably a net win, but this is not the technological singularity where we'll all live forever...

Highly processed foods already switched over to using better packaging that keeps oxygen and moisture out (trans fats don't particularly taste better than other oils, they have better shelf life, improved packaging makes up for much of the difference).

Proof that I am not rambling incoherently:

http://www.pffc-online.com/technical-reports/5213-paper-prod...

So no worries there.

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