Trans Fats

Did the title scare you?  Did your arteries tense up a little?  Or did you imagine a delicious fried chicken meal? 

The media has done a good job at creating a fear of trans fats.  Every label on vending machine chips has “zero trans fat” on it.  So that must be really bad stuff if it takes up so much space on the front of the bag.  But is that all the public knows about it?  That it’s bad?  And what about the other fats?

There are several types of fats including monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, saturated, and trans.  These names are given based on their chemical structure.  The two unsaturated fats are considered to be the “good” fats.  These are found in fish, nuts, etc.  They don’t have a hydrogen atom to fill every carbon atom.  This allows the carbon to form a double bond, which creates a kink in the structure.  

Saturated fats are molecules in which the carbon atoms all are saturated with hydrogen atoms.  Trans fats are “hydrogenated”, artificially made fats that are similar to saturated fats; the difference is in the orientation of the hydrogen atoms in the middle of the molecule.  

Trans fats are found in fried food and also in foods like piecrusts that have a long shelf life (the reason trans fats are added).  The saturated fats are nice and full of hydrogen atoms and happy.  They easily stack and pack together.  Saturated fats are solid at room temperature while unsaturated fats are like liquid oils.  This is because of the chemical structure.  Think of paper.  Regular sheets (saturated and flat molecules) are easy to stack together.  When the paper is kinked or crumpled (molecules of unsaturated fats), you can fit a lot less into a certain space.  Solids are more ordered structures than liquids.  The disorder in the mono and polyunsaturated fats make them the “good” fats because they can’t stack up (like the saturated and trans fats) in your arteries to form clots and block blood flow. 

So saturated fats are bad; trans fats are worse.  They have similar structure to the saturated fats but the main difference is that they are artificially made.  Our bodies don’t need them.  Our bodies know how to break down and “deal with” small amounts of saturated fats.  Trans fats interrupt the absorption of essential hormones, vitamins and nutrients.  They lower our “good” cholesterol and raise our bad.  They interrupt bodily chemical reactions.

The FDA has begun taking steps to reduce the trans fat in food.  Companies are required to put it on the labels, but if it is less than .5 grams per serving, they can say there is zero trans fat.  There are a lot of people that think the FDA needs to protect the public from very harmful ingredients like trans fats.  The following video is from a website called Ban Trans Fats.   

After watching this 2 min video, do you believe the FDA is slacking in helping keep our country safe from ingesting harmful foods?