It is unclear how deeply the New York pressure against trans fatty acids and hydrogenated oils is going to affect our dietary and investment landscape. Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) sure jumped up in a hurry to change its ways and KFC a division of Yum Brands (NYSE:YUM), dropped its trans fat ingredients shortly after it was legally taken to task about them. How is this whole scenario going to affect Altria Group (NYSE:MO) and Kraft Foods (NYSE: KFT)? If investors who have money tied up with the providers and users of trans fatty oils aren't taking a hard look at their portfolios, well in my opinion, they had better.

I don't think this is going to be a situation taken lightly. As a matter of fact, I see a rather nasty avalanche on the horizon. How long do you think it's going to be before some poor 300-pound soul is going to team up with some sloppy lawyer who has more time than guts and the two of them class- action this thing in a manner similar to the tobacco debacle of the 80s? If you don't think it's going to happen, then I think you need to get out more often.

I imagine there have been some heated meetings in the board rooms of companies who manufacture and market that stabilized oily junk. What do you think they're going to do, keep making it and hope the noise will die down? That will be the game plan of the lame and blind among our corporate food leaders. I guarantee you the bright ones are making hydrogenated exit plans right now.

Does this signal a pitiful writhing death for trans fatty oils? Not if you have an imagination and a couple usable gonads to go with it. How about having someone develop a home-heating system that utilizes the stuff as fuel? It's safe, stable, biodegradable (outside the body), and it even smells good when it burns. Have you ever burned a potato chip? Hey man, that's for real BTUs!!! When you take the components of hydrogenated oils and separate them you have umm, hydrogen and oil. Do you see what I'm getting at?

So don't give up on hydrogenated oils completely, but guard yourself and your investment dollars with care. If your portfolio is laden with trans fats and your companies are exhibiting a wait-and-see attitude, you need to find out if they have alternate plans. If you think this new move to cut fats from your diet will be short lived or quiet, you could be in for more than one kind of heart attack.

The following definitions are courtesy of Answers.com:

Hydrogenated oil: Unsaturated liquid vegetable oil that has had hydrogen catalytically added so as to convert the oil to a hydrogen-saturated solid.

Trans fatty acid: An unsaturated fatty acid produced by the partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils and present in hardened vegetable oils, most margarines, commercial baked foods, and many fried foods. An excess of these fats in the diet is thought to raise the cholesterol level in the bloodstream.

I wrote a post last week about the sudden and shocking death by heart attack of Ken Lay, Enron's founder. That single post has not only been one of Blogging Stocks' mostly widely read entries, but it also has produced an incredible outpouring of emotion from readers -- one that keeps on coming.

You know the five stages of grief? Well, at least three are clearly represented in the comments.

Denial is by far the most prominent (that's both denial that he died of natural causes and denial that he is dead at all). Just today a reader commented that he could have been injected with something that gave the appearance of a major heart attack. Many have invoked his relationship with President Bush to imply all sorts of alternative scenarios -- quite often involving the witness protection program.

Most convincing was a doctor who wrote that he found it implausible that a man of Lay's age and wealth could have an undiagnosed heart condition that would trigger a massive coronary without warning. That one got me thinking...

Anger would be next, as far as representation in blog comments. I would say the bulk of the 139 commenters to date are very angry at Lay -- for losing their money; for losing the money of his employees, for possibly preserving great wealth for his wife by dying before his sentencing (video news report). Many of them even are mad at him for dying since they liked to imagine him suffering during his prison term. Just let it go, I say.

Acceptance was another stage clearly in evidence. Surprised? Lots of of these folks clearly found comfort from the Bible and urged others not to cast the first stone and the like. 

Depression is one stage that didn't show up in great numbers in the comments. I'm sure there were plenty of people depressed by reading all those angry comments hurled at a man we just learned had died. But do truly depressed people comment on blogs? I doubt it.

What about Bargaining? I didn't see much sign of that. It's not really applicable here -- that's the stage where you basically bargain with God (or your deity of choice) not to let something bad happen and you'll donate all your money to charity or something. But we're talking about Ken Lay, one of the most disgraced corporate executives in history. And who would bargain over him, even posthumously?

In a chilling twist to the Enron saga -- an epic tail of fraud, greed and all too little heroism -- founder Ken Lay died of a heart attack in Colorado at age 64.

Message boards are burning up over the news. Lay's critics (I admit, a tepid word to describe their pure hatred), are howling at the idea. They think that he somehow got off through his death. Many of them apparently don't believe it was a simple case of a heart attack. Some speculate there was foul play involved in his death. Some even believe that he faked his death through a stunt of some kind and has escaped authorities.

The truth is that Lay's death by heart attack shouldn't be too great a surprise. I'm no doctor and I know a massive coronary can strike the healthiest and certainly the most honorable people without warning. But could many people have been under more stress than Lay? Given his May 25 conviction, he seemed destined to live out the rest of his life behind bars. Sentencing was set for October 23. If he had been deluding himself that he would be found innocent during his trial, his conviction erased any hope.

Maybe Lay would have died of a massive coronary at age 64 even if Enron had stayed on the straight and narrow. And, if Ken Lay knew his fate was to die at that relatively young age, would he have risked his company and his legacy on fraudulent dealings?

To me, that is the most interesting question: If Ken Lay  had remembered how short life can be, would he really have wasted his time on earth causing so much pain and destruction?

For any other corporate leaders who about to slide down a slippery slope of fraud and corruption, his early demise provides a chilling lesson: Life's too short to be a crook.