Is your lecithin hydrogenated?

Not dead yet!

Well-Known Member
I found this while looking into what the upper limit of lecithin might be per day. I was wondering that because I saw some old articles saying they'd fed 2.5 grams of it to rats for 18 months, every day. And it was therapeutic, it reduced fatty liver for them. This was very outdated, like 1920s, but sometimes old stuff gives me ideas.

Anyway, I found a new "GRAS" notice from 2014 claiming that hydrogenated lecithin is useable in foods as an additive. They explain it like this:

"The substance is commonly known as lecithin. Commercial lecithin is a complex mixture of phosphatides obtained from various edible food sources. Because the composition of phosphatides in lecithin is dependent upon its source and due to differences in degree of saturation of the phosphatidyl fatty acids, we are describing lecithin whose constituent phosphatides contain fully saturated fatty acid chains as hydrogenated lecithin (HL) to distinguish it from (non-hydrogenated) lecithins whose constituent phosphatides contain fatty acids with varying degrees of saturation. Soybean-derived hydrogenated lecithin is recognized as HL in this GRAS notification. "

https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/GRAS/NoticeInventory/ucm422883.pdf

Since I depend on this as a cheap source of choline you can imagine the impact if I am suddenly taking 10g of hydrogenated fat per day.

I can't tell if the manufacturer has to tell you that there are trans fats in it or not. Looks like not.


 

Not dead yet!

Well-Known Member
Why am I not finding online dismay, blog posts and other outrage over this hidden trans fat? Not even from the paleo community that fawns over sunflower lecithin? The first hit for me is "Truth in Aging" website which just fawns over the product. It's like the Twilight Zone.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogenated+lecithin&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Why does the FDA allow this without trans fat labeling? Why would they bother to hydrogenate again, after all the trouble it caused already? Melt down those hydrogenation machines already. We're done with them.
 

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