Your Favourite Indian Biscuit May Still Have Banned Trans Fats

Trans fats occupy an unusual place in food safety regulation: they are not a natural contaminant or an accidental byproduct, but a deliberately engineered ingredient — created by partially hydrogenating liquid vegetable oil to make it solid, shelf-stable, and cheaper than butter or ghee — whose health harms have been established with unusual scientific consensus for over two decades. India's FSSAI has moved to restrict them, but the persistence of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in everyday bakery products years after the 2022 cap shows the gap between a regulation existing on paper and full compliance across a market as large and fragmented as India's packaged food sector.

A recent study found that Indian cream biscuits, cookies, and puff pastries still contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, despite FSSAI capping industrially produced trans fats at 2% since 2022. This is alarming, as India already has a high prevalence of coronary heart disease, with over 30 million cases reported annually. The continued presence of trans fats in these products poses a significant risk to public health. Global and India-focused analyses from WHO and public health researchers put the toll from industrially produced trans fats at over 60,000 coronary heart disease deaths in India each year, making this one of the most concrete, India-specific health costs of any food additive covered on this site — and one of the reasons India is named among the countries WHO still flags for incomplete trans-fat elimination policy, despite the 2022 labelling cap.

Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, also known as Vanaspati, is a primary source of trans fats in Indian bakery products. It is not assigned an individual E-number the way many food additives are — it's classified as an ingredient/processing category rather than a single approved additive, so it appears on labels as "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" or "vanaspati" rather than a numbered code. Although the FSSAI has set a limit of 2% for industrially produced trans fats, many products still exceed this limit. The WHO has recommended a limit of 1% of total energy intake from trans fats, and some countries like the EU have banned them altogether.

FSSAI didn't move to the 2% cap in one step. The regulation phased in gradually: the limit was set at 3% of total fat by January 2021, then reduced further to 2% by January 2022 — a deliberate two-stage tightening aligned with the WHO's global call ("REPLACE") to eliminate industrially produced trans fats from the food supply entirely by 2023. This phased approach gave manufacturers a transition window rather than an abrupt cutoff, which is part of why some products may still show trace or non-compliant trans fat levels even after the rule technically took full effect.

Partially hydrogenated vegetable oil/vanaspati has historically been used across a wide range of Indian bakery and snack categories because it's cheaper than butter or ghee and gives products a longer shelf life and firmer texture: cream-filled biscuits, glazed and iced cookies, puff pastries and khari, some packaged cakes and rusks, and certain deep-fried snacks that use vanaspati as the frying medium rather than a liquid oil. Checking specifically for "partially hydrogenated" or "vanaspati" on the ingredient list — rather than assuming a "0g trans fat" front-of-pack claim settles the question — is the more reliable check, since India's labelling convention allows "0g trans fat" claims on products with under 0.2g per serving, which isn't the same as a literal zero.

Trans fats increase the levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, also known as 'bad' cholesterol, while decreasing the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, or 'good' cholesterol. This can lead to the narrowing of arteries, increasing the risk of coronary heart disease. A landmark pooled analysis of roughly 140,000 people across four prospective cohort studies (Mozaffarian et al.) found that each 2% increase in energy intake from trans fats — around 4g/day on a typical 2,000-calorie diet — was associated with a 23% higher risk of coronary heart disease and heart attack, making trans fats, calorie for calorie, one of the most harmful components identified in the modern diet.

For home cooking, groundnut oil, mustard oil, and rice bran oil are widely available, liquid-at-room-temperature alternatives to vanaspati that don't carry the same industrial trans fat profile — each has a different smoke point and flavour, so the right choice depends on the dish (mustard oil for tempering, groundnut oil for deep frying, rice bran oil as a neutral all-purpose option). For packaged bakery products, checking whether a brand has published a trans-fat-free reformulation commitment, and verifying it against the actual ingredient list rather than the front-of-pack claim, remains the most reliable approach.

Individuals with a family history of coronary heart disease, as well as those with existing cardiovascular conditions, are most at risk from consuming trans fats. In India, this is particularly concerning, as over 10% of the population has hypertension, and over 20% have high cholesterol. Children and adolescents who consume trans fat-rich foods regularly are also at risk of developing cardiovascular disease later in life.

Because India's labelling rule permits a "0g trans fat" claim on any product with under 0.2g per serving, the front-of-pack number is not a reliable stand-in for actually checking the ingredient list. The two terms worth scanning for are "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" and "vanaspati" — either one indicates the product was made with an ingredient capable of contributing industrial trans fats, regardless of what the nutrition panel's trans fat line states. Serving size is the other detail worth checking: a pack listing "0g trans fat per serving" where the stated serving size is unrealistically small compared to how much of the product is typically eaten in one sitting can still add up to a meaningful trans fat intake across a normal portion.

Denmark became the first country to essentially eliminate industrial trans fats from its food supply in 2003, capping them at 2% of total fat in any product — a policy credited with a measurable subsequent drop in national cardiovascular mortality rates that researchers have specifically attributed to the trans fat restriction rather than other concurrent health trends. The WHO's global REPLACE initiative, launched in 2018, set a 2023 target for worldwide elimination of industrially produced trans fats, using a best-practice policy standard of 2g trans fat per 100g of total fat. India's approach — a phased reduction to 2% by 2022 — is broadly aligned with this global direction, but WHO's own tracking has continued to list India among the countries where implementation and enforcement still lag the policy on paper, which is the regulatory context behind why non-compliant products can still reach shelves years after the cap technically took effect.

For packaged bakery products specifically, favouring brands that have published explicit trans-fat-free reformulation statements — and spot-checking those claims against the actual ingredient list rather than trusting a front-of-pack badge — is the most direct lever available to a shopper. For home cooking, replacing vanaspati with a liquid oil suited to the specific cooking method (mustard oil for tempering, groundnut oil for deep frying, rice bran oil as a neutral all-purpose choice) removes the primary source entirely rather than managing around it. For anyone with existing cardiovascular risk factors — a family history of heart disease, existing hypertension, or high cholesterol — treating trans fat avoidance as a higher priority than choices around saturated fat is reasonable given the disproportionate risk trans fats carry per gram compared to other dietary fats, a distinction supported by the cohort evidence covered above.

Trans fats and saturated fats are often lumped together in casual dietary advice, but the cohort evidence treats them very differently, and conflating the two leads to worse decisions at the shelf. Saturated fat's relationship with cardiovascular risk is genuinely debated in the current nutrition science literature, with some large meta-analyses finding weaker or more context-dependent associations than once assumed. Trans fats carry no such ambiguity — the mechanism (raising LDL while simultaneously lowering protective HDL, a dual effect saturated fat does not replicate) and the outcome data are consistent enough that WHO, FSSAI, and virtually every major cardiology body treat industrial trans fat elimination as a settled public health priority rather than an open scientific question. Practically, this means a product swapping vanaspati for a saturated fat like palm oil is still a meaningful improvement, even though palm oil itself isn't risk-free — the two fats are not equivalent hazards.

Large organised bakery and biscuit manufacturers moved comparatively quickly to reformulate around the FSSAI's tightening 2021-2022 trans fat limits, since they have the testing infrastructure and supply chain flexibility to switch to interesterified or blended fats that avoid partial hydrogenation while still meeting the texture and shelf-life requirements of packaged snacks. The compliance gap that studies continue to find sits disproportionately with smaller, unbranded, and regional bakery producers — the local biscuit and cream-roll manufacturers who supply a large share of what's actually sold in smaller towns and through unorganised retail — where testing, reformulation cost, and enforcement capacity are all weaker. This is a useful distinction for shoppers: a well-known national brand's packaged biscuit is statistically less likely to still contain vanaspati than an unbranded or loose-sold bakery product, even though neither category is risk-free without checking the actual label.

Bakery products get most of the attention in trans fat coverage, but vanaspati and partially hydrogenated oil also show up in categories that don't read as "bakery" at all: some street-food and restaurant deep frying (where vanaspati's stability at high heat and lower cost than ghee or refined oil make it attractive for repeated-use frying vats), certain instant noodle and namkeen snack lines, non-dairy creamers and whiteners used in tea stalls and packaged coffee mixes, and some vegetarian imitation dairy products marketed as butter or cream alternatives. None of these are required to disclose vanaspati use as prominently as a packaged biscuit's ingredient list does, which is part of why trans fat exposure from eating out or from small unbranded snack purchases can run higher than a shopper's packaged-goods label-checking habits alone would suggest.

The core facts are well-established and worth holding onto past the headline: trans fats are the single most harmful fat category identified in cardiovascular research, FSSAI's 2% cap is a genuine and meaningful regulation, but a cap on paper is not the same as full compliance across every manufacturer, and India's "0g trans fat" labelling threshold means the front-of-pack claim cannot substitute for actually checking whether "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" or "vanaspati" appears in the ingredient list. That one habit — reading past the trans fat number to the ingredient list itself — is the single most reliable way to act on everything covered in this guide. Pairing that habit with a general preference for liquid oils over vanaspati in home cooking, and treating trans fat exposure as a higher-priority concern than most other fat-related dietary worries, covers the practical response most people need.