the end of the second link pretty much sums it up..
Here's the problem. We have no idea what the long-term health consequences will be of long-term use of interesterified fats. It took 30 years to figure out that transfats were not healthy, and it is likely to take just as long with interesterified fats - or any other fat we can invent that does not exist in nature. A recent study out of Malaysia and Brandeis University appears to show that interesterified fats can worsen LDL and HDL levels, and increase blood glucose levels. So perhaps these new substances are not the final answer. But any new species of man-made fat will have the same generic problem - we won't know for decades what the true health impact will be, even though we need to decide today whether to manufacture, sell and consume them. The fact is, if we're going to eat processed, long-shelf-life fat-containing foods at all, we need to use either saturated fats - or transfats, interesterified fats, or some other variety of man-made stuff. The safest thing to do, obviously, is to eat only fresh, non-processed foods for the next 20 - 30 years until the science sorts itself out. Another approach, less safe but possibly more practical, is to limit our intake of processed foods to reasonable levels, and increase our intake of fresh foods as much as we can.
The article I mentioned last summer in my first post listed what "ingredients" to watch for, and "fully hydrogenated oils" was one of them.
What is Interesterified Fat?
When scientific studies exposed the inherent dangers to public health in trans fats, many processed food manufacturers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. They needed to find a form of fat which would still provide the extended
shelf life of partially-hydrogenated oils, but did not contain trans
fatty acids. One solution arrived in the form of
interesterified fat,
a fully hydrogenated product with many of the same characteristics as trans fat, but closer to saturated fat chemically. Interesterified fat is produced through a process called
interesterification, which rearranges the molecular structure of fatty plant oils.