Two articles: http://deltafarmpress.com/news/061101-soy-oil/
'Colonel' changing recipe to low-linolenic soy oil Nov 1, 2006 10:11 AM By Forrest Laws Farm Press Editorial Staff Yum Brands, Inc., the company that owns 5,500 KFC restaurants across the country, has announced it is making a change in its cooking oil that should give new meaning to the words "Finger-Licking Good." Yum said it is switching from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil to low-linolenic soybean oil. The company specifically cited Monsanto's Vistive brand of soybeans as the source of its new low-linolenic oil, but other company products will be available. "We applaud Yum Brands, Inc., on its movement toward eliminating trans fats from Kentucky Fried Chicken products by transitioning to a low-linolenic soybean oil," said John Becherer, CEO of Qualisoy, a soybean industry initiative aimed at helping market healthier, more functional soybean products to the food industry. Becherer said the announcement could add an estimated $100 million per year to the value of soybeans grown in the United States. Following the 2006 harvest, he said, 400 million pounds of low-linolenic oil could be available. More than 1 billion pounds of low-linolenic oil could be in the market following the 2007 harvest if the industry's plans to ramp up production of the new class of soybeans come to fruition. Qualisoy officials said soybean farmers have invested $38.5 million in checkoff money to help expand soybean usage through the following areas: animal utilization, industrial utilization, human utilization, supply, industry relations and market access. Besides the Vistive brand, low-linolenic soybeans that currently meet Qualisoy quality standards include Pioneer brand low-linolenic soybeans and Asoyia ultra low-linolenic soybeans. Several cooking oils resulting from the low-linolenic soybeans are now on the market. Among those are Advantage LL soy oil processed by Cargill; Vistive low-linolenic soy oil processed by Ag Processing, Cenex Harvest States and Zeeland Farms; Treus brand soy oil, developed in partnership by Bunge and DuPont; and Asoyia ultra low-linolenic soybean oil. Monsanto officials said they were pleased with the move to low-linolenic soybean oils, the second by a major food company in the last 12 months. "KFC's announcement and others like it present a unique opportunity for North American farmers," said Jerry Steiner, executive vice president of Monsanto. "Demand for this type of oil continues to out-strip supply. "Farmers can demonstrate to the food industry that they are able to provide the best alternative oil in the fight to reduce trans fats while, at the same time, earning a premium growing low-linolenic soybeans." (Vistive soybeans are currently available in Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Nebraska.) Last December, Kellogg Co. announced it would reformulate using Qualisoy-approved low-linolenic soybean oil to eliminate trans fats from a number of its food products. Kellogg's will use a variety processed from Monsanto's Vistive and Bunge/Pioneer's Treus low-linolenic soybean oils. Monsanto has announced it is expanding acreage of Vistive soybeans into Ohio and Maryland. The soybeans carry the Roundup Ready trait and are available in a number of Monsanto and other seed company brands. The company says it currently has no plans to market low-linolenic soybeans in the South, but researchers are working on a high stearate soybean that will be targeted for southern production. The latter will have higher levels of stearic acid, which means that products such as margarines and shortening won't have to be hydrogenated. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------- Out of the fat, not the fire KFC's decision to cut the trans fats from its US restaurants isn't quite the boon for good health as it at first seems. Felicity Lawrence The Guardian, Comment is Free, 1 November 2006 http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/felicity_lawrence/2006/11/out_of_t he_fat_not_the_fire.html KFC announced on Monday that it was changing its frying oil to eliminate trans fats from its main meals in the USA. Monday as it happens was also the day the New York City Board of Health began a public hearing on whether restaurants in New York should be banned from selling foods with trans fats on the grounds that they increase the risk of heart disease and have no nutritional value. But the pressure has been building up for some time. Labelling regulations in the US have changed, forcing manufacturers to own up to how much trans fat - produced by partial hydrogenation of industrial oils - is in their products. A retired doctor had also filed a class action four months ago against the company for selling food with trans fats without telling its customers. The lawsuit was supported by the campaign group, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI), which greeted KFC's news as an important milestone and announced it will now withdraw its lawsuit. So that's a victory for public health and consumer power then. CSPI has certainly achieved remarkable progress in the US. But KFC is not changing its recipes in the UK where it uses partially hydrogenated rapeseed oil, although it says it has been researching new fats here. Not enough lawsuits perhaps. Nor does the KFC website for the UK tell customers how much trans fat is in its products, although it tells me it will during 2007. You have to go to the UK campaign group Which? for the information that a KFC meal contains 4.4g of trans fat according to its analysis. And here's a curious thing. KFC in the US is switching from partially hydrogenated soya oil to a new low-linolenic soya oil. The new low-linolenic soya oil has only 3% alpha-linolenic acid compared with 8% in standard soya oil. That alpha-linolenic acid is the omega-3 fatty acid that is pretty short in the industrialised diet and most of us could do with more of it rather than less. But it's a bore to manufacturers because it's unstable. Hydrogenating was one way to deal with it, engineering it out of the bean is another. And yes, you've guessed, the new low-linolenic soy oil for KFC comes from a soya bean developed by biotech giant Monsanto. Monsanto's website explains how this new soybean, called Vistive, is now being planted in large tracts of the American mid-west "to help manufactures reduce the presence of trans fatty acids in their products". Vistive, its says, was "developed through conventional breeding". A puzzle then that Vistive soybeans also have the trademarked GM Roundup Ready trait so that they can be sprayed with the company's herbicide glyphosphate. If you want to know how a new transgenic soybean can manage not to be a new genetically engineered soybean, have a look at another campaign website, the anti-GM Institute of Science in Society. But here's the real conundrum. Thanks to subsidies and the muscle of large US-based food multinationals, 20% of available calories in the US now come from soy oil. Experts such as Joseph Hibbeln at the US government's National Institutes for Health believe this unprecedented change in our diets is not only responsible for cardiovascular disease but is changing the architecture and functioning of the brain. http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1924356,00.html His theory is that the dramatic rise in omega-6 fatty acids mainly from oils such as soya, have flooded out the omega-3 fatty acids we need to build the brain, as well as for vascular health, because they compete for the same metabolic pathways. If he's right, companies like KFC are leaping out of the fat straight into another oil-fuelled fire. But don't worry Monsanto is on the case. It has another new modified soya bean in the pipeline - Vistive omega-3, due to become available around 2011-2013. Perhaps they hope customers won't have noticed this other problem before then. It's taken over a decade for progress on trans fatty aids after all. There is of course another simpler way - just stop eating so much industrial oil, full stop. But then KFC couldn't sell so much fried chicken. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
