Hydrogenating vegatable oils is truly some sort of mad scientist invention. The fats we consume are hydrocarbon chains (like petroleum) expcept that they are attached to a another common molucule (can't remember this without my chemistry book, maybe glycol). The unsaturated oils are the ones that are missing hydrogens on the hydrocarbon chains, and saturated oils are the ones that have all the hydrogens you would expect to see on a normal hydrocarbon chain. So here is the mad scientists solution - bubble hydrogen through an unsaturated vegetable oil so that you end up with a saturated oil that is solid at room temperature like a saturated fat. Pretty stupid, but what is worse, these new hydrogens don't simply fill in the holes in an unsaturated fat, they stack up on each other, creating something that is rarely found in natural food that people eat. Should we be surprised to find that this stuff is bad for lots of people? I am all for better living through chemistry, but this is one clear example where people have not been given the whole truth and government was too stupid to step in and tell the mad scientists and profits-uber-alles crowd to head back to the drawing board.