The Truth of Trans Fat
Bite-Size Reads for Your Waistline and Your Health
When we hear the word “fat,” our mind immediately jumps to the worst. Unhealthy, unattractive, avoid eating it at all costs, the enemy of all enemies. But, what if it wasn’t all bad? What if there was more than one kind of fat and there were key differences to note about each of them? Understanding the differences is critical for optimal health and lucky for you, I have the answers you’re seeking!
The first myth that we are going to bust — all fat is bad. It’s NOT! Yeah, I said it. For years now, fat has gotten a terrible reputation, yet people are still struggling with understanding it. So I am here to break it down. While the focus today is trans fats, we first need to back up and have a bit of a foundational understanding of fats as a whole. Essentially, there are two types of fat: unsaturated and saturated.
Unsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature — which is what we want. WINNER! Choose these daily. Examples of this would be olive oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, etc. The other type, saturated fat, is solid at room temperature. A great example of saturated fat is the marbling of a steak; if we leave the steak on the counter, that marbling (fat) doesn’t melt and disappear. As humans, we need a slight amount of these, which we’ll get inevitably in our daily food choices so I wouldn’t make any effort to include them. There is, however, one type of fat that we want to avoid completely — trans fat.
Trans fats are originally liquid at room temperature that is turned into a solid. Food manufacturers pump the oil with hydrogen to make it solid at room temperature. This factory interference changes the chemistry of the fat. It will no longer separate from the foods it’s in while sitting on store shelves. It keeps baked goods moist and maintains their texture, while also extending shelf life of foods. Kind of scary if you think about it.
But considering the food manufacturer’s and store’s perspectives, it makes a lot of economic sense! It keeps the bounty of processed and packaged foods fresh and moist as they sit there waiting to be purchased. Less waste!
What makes this even more interesting is that the FDA no longer allows trans fats. We often see boxes with strong claims of “no trans fat” or “0g of trans fat.” Unfortunately, this can be false advertising. In reality, the FDA rule is that it’s 0g of trans fat per serving. To add to the confusion, in food-label math, .5g or less per serving can be rounded DOWN. Yep, rounded down to zero. So, if you see a box with these marketing call-outs, it may have .05g or less per serving. Considering we often eat more than one serving at a time, it’s a case of zero plus zero does not equal zero. Yikes! What do we do? We must learn to be super-savvy consumers.
It’s actually simpler than it sounds. Just read the ingredients. They are there, on the food label, right under all the numbers. Look for words such as “modified, fractionated, hydrogenated, or hydrolyzed” in front of an oil, usually a vegetable oil. If you see it, quietly, replace the package on the shelf and back away. These key words tell us the vegetable oil was chemically altered, likely in an effort to extend the shelf-life of the food. As one of my mentor’s, a naturopathic doctor, says: the longer the food’s shelf life, the shorter yours is. Dun dun dun dun.
That may sound dramatic and dark, but trans fats truly have serious side effects on our health. At the end of the day, we can only avoid them as much as we make an effort to avoid them. I strongly encourage you to practice investigating those ingredients before mindlessly buying packaged foods. Better yet, avoid the whole thing and just buy foods that don’t have a label at all (aka your fruits and vegetables!) I know, I know…We are human and are bound to eat packaged, processed foods at some point in our lives. That’s why we’re talking about it! And now you have this information to make smarter choices daily; I’m willing to bet you’ll see and feel a long-term difference.
