Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Tuesday, January 26, 2010 10:32 am TWN, By Nicole Ostrow, Bloomberg

Sponsors
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!
▪	Save 75% for all hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and whole China. Lowest rates for Flights in China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.

Fast food chains use higher-fat corn oil

Fats called polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, which are found in safflower, soy, sunflower seed and canola oils, may help lower cholesterol when they are used instead of saturated fats, according to the heart association. Corn oil has a higher amount of saturated fats and is lower in the so-called good fats than other commonly used vegetable oils.

The researchers bought French fries from 68 of the 101 national chain fast-food restaurants on Oahu and from 66 small businesses. They analyzed the content of the oil. The purchases and analysis were done over the past year and a half, said lead study author A. Hope Jahren, a professor of geobiology at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

Mom-and-Pop Restaurants

“We found this big difference between the national chains and the mom-and-pop restaurants,” Jahren said Jan. 15 in a telephone interview.

Fries from San Diego-based Jack in the Box Inc. outlets didn't show corn oil, according to the study. Although it's hard to distinguish non-corn oils, Jahren said that based on composition the smaller restaurants probably cooked their fries in a soy oil.

According to the study, 32 pounds (14.5 kilograms) of corn oil costs US$70, while the same amount of canola oil costs US$75 and soybean oil costs US$50. The researchers said using soy and soy-mixture alternatives makes sense from a small business perspective, because of the price. To make corn oil cost-effective, the researchers said “it is probably necessary to contract ingredients on a large scale from preferred distributors.”

Consumer Information

Jahren said restaurants aren't providing enough information about what they're using to cook foods and making it available while people are deciding what to eat.

Consumers really deserve more information about what's in their food and how it's made, she said. Fries are a very basic component of restaurant diets. There are very simple questions about it ─ how is it made? what is it fried in? ─ that the consumer can't get any good information for.

A study in the Archives of Internal Medicine in July found that French fries at restaurants run by McDonald's, Wendy's/Arby's Group and closely held White Castle Restaurants had 98 percent less trans fat and 10 percent less saturated fat in New York since the city's health commission banned artificial trans fats in restaurants.

1|2