Colonel Sanders and his boys make it finger licking healthy?

I dunno, somehow the idea of a "healthier" Kentucky Fried Chicken sounds a lot like that "New" coke experiment, do you really want to go there.

But then again, when you don't have a choice you have to make the best of it I guess. With the current mass hysteria over trans fat in our diet and pending legislation to ban the evil fats, the staple of the land, that bucket of the Colonel's finest is getting a health concsious upgrade.

KFC is switching to a canola based oil which will result in zero trans fats delivered to our arteries, as we dive into the snack packs and buckets at will. They follow the trend a Canadian fast food franchises to reduce the levels of the trans fat in our diets, while still hoping to protect their market share.

But we wonder if it will now qualify for the Healthy Heart program?

I'll show my age a bit here, but I long remember those days long gone by when picking up a bucket of chicken after a baseball practice was the norm at our house. A quick solution to the night's dinner choices and a finger licking good experience of the times.

A little further down the years in my life I vaguely remember a restaurant chain in Manitoba called Mary Brown's that used a secret cooking recipe to take on the KFC goliath. The selling point at the time was that their fried chicken was a healthy alternative to the established brand, which considering it was fried chicken seemed like kind of an oxymoron.

Regardless, I don't seem to see as many of them around the nation(and even that one in Manitoba seems to have disappaered) as the Colonel can muster, so I gather the epic battle over chicken domination never took off.

I'll give the folks at KFC the benefit of the doubt and wait and see (and since we live in a KFC free zone at the moment there's a lot of benefit of a doubt to come). But I look forward to the day when I can see if the new and improved KFC passes the finger lickin' test..