Trans Fatty Acids
The dangers of trans fats.
We have all heard of trans fats and most of us are aware that the trans part refers to the first part of the name 'trans fatty acids'.
However we need to remember it is also the first part of the word transfer, or transport, or translate - and what do these trans fats do? Transfer/transport or translate themselves straight into body weight, that's what!
This was brought home to me by an article I read in New Scientist Magazine, 17 June 2006. (This site can sometimes be a bit overloaded.)
It appears that researchers at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in the US conducted an experiment on two groups of monkeys.
Each group was fed identical quantities of calories, enough to sustain life but not enough to cause weight gain.
One of the groups got 8% of their allotted calories from trans fats while the other group got theirs from fats other than trans fats.
At the end of 6 years the monkeys getting the trans fats had gained considerable weight, and what is even more important to us type 2 diabetics, a lot of that weight was sited in the abdominal area! They also developed signs of insulin resistance.
The researchers, realising the importance of this to diabetics and to those with heart disease, have apparently passed this information on to the American Diabetes Association.
If you consider that the amount of trans fats fed those monkeys was the equivalent of a single meal of burger and chips a day you have to wonder what our fast food diet, so full of trans fats, is doing to us. Is it any wonder that obesity is rising in our young people?
So what exactly are there trans fats?
Normal vegetable oils contain unsaturated fats and, be they sunflower, cannola/rapeseed, cottonseed oil or any other you can think of, are, as you are well aware, liquids.
This makes them a tad difficult to spread on bread, would you not agree? Manufacturers of baked goods also find they have other unwanted attributes, like 'leaking' out of the goodies after a while.
However if you artificially alter these liquid oils in a process known as hydrogenation, the oil solidifies. These are now called hydrogenated fats or hydrogenated vegetable oils. It is this process that produces the harmful trans fats.
What is hydrogenation?
I am not going to go into all the scientific details around the hydrogenation process but for those who are interested I will explain the basics .
1. Take ordinary vegetable oil and put it in a vat with fine particles of a reactive metal such as nickel, copper or cobalt.
2. Heat this mixture to around 200 degrees C and keep it at that heat for around 6 hours.
3. While doing this bubble hydrogen gas through the mixture under high pressure. It is at this stage that the chemical changes occur, the molecules in the hot oil bond with the hydrogen and produce the harmful trans fatty acids.
If the process is stopped before the oil totally solidifies we then have what is called a partially-hydrogenated oil.
If the process is allowed to continue until all the oil molecules have bonded with hydrogen then we have a fully hydrogenated fatty acid that is really solid.
As I understand it at this stage it looks a bit like hard plastic beads and needs to be mixed with some more liquid oil and reheated before it can be used as, say, margarine.
Why were these trans fats created?
In around the 1950's the fuss about the health hazards of saturated fats (still a hotly debated topic) became a big issue.
Manufacturers needed to find something to replace these fats in their products or they were going to loose a lot of money from health conscious customers.
Enter the process of partial hydrogenation. This had been known about for quite a while but now it came into it's own. They were able to produce stable fat from vegetable oils and we all know that unsaturated vegetable oils are better for us than those ghastly saturated animal fats!
So we were told to eat margarine, high in polyunsaturated fats, instead of butter which was stuffed full of unhealthy saturated fats.
Needless to say nobody told us that their wonderful margarine was also full of hydrogenated fat containing harmful trans fats. I doubt that the affects of the trans fats produced by the process were even considered at the time.
And then there were the added benefits
Hydrogenated fats were much more stable. They did not quickly become rancid and have to be thrown away. They were so much more convenient and also less expensive.
You could also heat and reheat them and they did not smoke out your kitchen - or that of the fast food shops!
Because trans fats are solid at room temperature, unlike their parent vegetable oils, manufacturers were able to use them in their baked goods, giving an improved taste and texture plus a hugely increased shelf life.
If all this sounds wonderful then read on:-
1. Trans fats are much more difficult to digest than those evil saturated fats, with the result that they cause Total and LDL cholesterol - that's the bad one - to increase and HDL, the good one, to decrease.
HDL is responsible for removing cholesterol from the blood into the intestines from where it can be got rid of. Lowering this results in the build up of fat within the arteries.
If the arteries going to the brain are clogged it can cause a stroke while clogging of the arteries to the heart can result in atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease.
2. Trans fats have been shown to hinder hormone production.
3. It has been suggested that they may weaken your immune system.
4. The fact that they cause an increase in abdominal weight makes them one of the causative agents for type 2 diabetes.
5.The body required a certain amount of fatty acids as building blocks (because it cannot make them itself), but trans fats cannot be used for this purpose and can block the ones that could be.
Since we are unable to utilise them in any way as they have no nutritional value, all we can do is burn them off as calories and few of us do enough exercise to achieve this.
So what is being done to warn the public?
It is taking a while but government agencies are starting to act. Institutes such as Harvard, the USA Department of Health and the National Academy of Sciences, amongst others, have been issuing warnings for some time about the dangers of these trans fats.
Up until now there was no law that said the amount of trans fats in food had to be noted on the nutritional labels. Trans fats were just included in the 'saturated fat' category. However, as from the 1st January 2006 the FDA in the US has stated that trans fats must be listed separately on all nutrition labels.
Unfortunately Europe has yet to follow suit in introducing such labelling laws. This is amazing if you take into consideration such facts as the trebling of obese people in the UK since 1980 and the dramatic increase in type 2 diabetes.
Hats must be taken off to Denmark who, with incredible foresight, in 2004 passed a law stating that manufacturers had to label trans fats on all food labels and also limited the amount of trans fats in any item to below 2%.
I have heard excuses made that listing trans fats on a label will not help much as it will just confuse people. I find that remark insulting. I feel I, and many others, have enough intelligence to read the label, assimilate the information and buy accordingly. They could at least give us the option!
I cannot help but wonder if the 'dragging of heels' in this department has more to do with fear about profits, than worry about confusing us. What will it cost companies if consumers find out how many of these dangerous fats actually are in their foods and stop buying them?
There are certain companies in the UK who are beginning to pay cognisance to the health problems caused by trans fats and are taking suitable action.
Full marks go to Marks and Spencer who say they will be removing all hydrogenated fats from their entire food range by mid 2006.
The food giant Tesco is making a lesser claim - they intend to remove it from their ready meals.
McVities are apparently also going to make an effort to reduce trans fats in their range of baked goods.
Check out this website for more info:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/health/3722546.stm
So what can we potentially 'confused individuals' do?
If you want to know if there are ANY trans fats in the product then you just need to check the ingredients list - if it says hydrogenated vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated vegetable fat, hydrogenated fats or maybe trans fatty acids then it has trans fats.
And note, the higher up the list the ingredient appears, the more trans fats the product will contain.
However if you are interested in exactly how many there are then the following information may help.
There is a pretty simple way of finding out the amount of trans fats in a product IF the label tells you the amount of total fat in the product and also how much is saturated and how much is mono-unsaturated.
You add the saturated and mono-unsaturated together and take that number away from the total fat.
The number left is the amount of trans fats in the product. Below is an example of this:-
Say your food has 50g of total fat, 9.5g of saturates and 26g of mono-unsaturates.
You add the 9.5 and the 26g which gives you 35.5g.
Take this away from 50 and you get a total of 14.5g of trans fats.
Which foods contain trans fats?
You will obviously have to check the ingredients list but below is a list of the most common foods:-
Ready made baked goods such as cakes, biscuits, muffins, do-nuts, crackers, taco shells.
Boxes of dry mixes for such goods e.g. cake, pancake, muffin, bread or biscuit mixes.
Ready made icing (frosting).
Frozen baked good, including waffles and pancakes.
Frozen ready meals like pizza or burritos.
Food made with pastry, like pasties and pies.
Frozen fish, especially the battered variety, and that kid's favourite, fish sticks.
French fries (chips)
Peanut butter
Margarine, especially stick margarine. (See * )
Cocoa powder
Microwave popcorn
Instant mashed potatoes
Breakfast cereals, including many leading brands.
Potato chips (crisps) or corn chips.
Ice cream - usually the low fat varieties.
Sauces and pasta mixes
Chocolate bars, especially those with biscuit like fillings, and certain other sweets (candies)
*Soft margarines have been developed that contain no, or very little, trans fats. However these cost more and do not work as well for cooking or baking so manufactures or baked goods are disinclined to use them.
Then there is that haven of trans fats, the Take Away.
Many of the fast food outlets, such as those making fish and chips or fried chicken, use hydrogenated vegetable oil in their deep fat fryers so the food they cook in them will contain trans fats.
Likewise trans fats are to be found in most meals got from hamburger outlets.
However in the UK I believe the worst offender is the Doner kebab, containing around 5.8g of trans fats.
Conclusion
Notice that it is the foods that most of us consider the 'easy' foods, those highly processed foods that we can come up with fast when we are busy or tired, that contain the most trans fats - life sucks for busy Moms doesn't it?
However we need to take action on behalf of our children.
Research in the US has shown children as young as 8 with high cholesterol and even some 3 year olds with fatty deposits in their arteries.
Not surprising if we take a look at the diet of many youngsters nowadays. It may be difficult to persuade them to eat a healthy diet but habits started young will, hopefully, stick. We really don't want to feel responsible for them getting diabetes in the future!
If we refuse to buy the food high in trans fats manufacturers will have to have a rethink and use a healthier option. If some companies can do it there must be such an option out there.