POISONOUS - Unsaturated, Saturated and Trans Fats
POISONOUS - Unsaturated, Saturated and Trans Fats
By Ina Woolcott
Fats, often wrongly called ‘bad for you’, are in fact vital for proper nutrition. Fatty acids are the raw materials helping to regulate blood pressure, inflammation , blood clotting and other body functions. However, fats are not created equally.
POISONOUS - Unsaturated, Saturated andTrans Fats
NO 1 = Unsaturated (liquid at room temperature). This is the healthiest fat, as the fat molecule’s carbon backbone isn’t saturated, or overloaded, with hydrogen atoms.
NO 2 = Saturated (solid at room temperature). These are come mainly from dairy and meat products, but aren’t as healthy as unsaturated fats, although they do contain valuable nutrients.
NO 3 = Trans fats. These offer no nutrition WHATSOEVER, cause rapid weight gain and abdominal fat. Even worse they raise LDL (bad cholesterol) levels. They lower HDL (the good cholesterol) as documented by many studies. Some studies show an association to diabetes and poor liver function. Harvard School of Public Health’s conservative guess that at least 30,000 deaths occur annually and maybe as high as 100,000 deaths from eating trans fats.
There ARE small amounts of trans fats NATURALLY occurring in milk and beef. This is okay, they are natural. However, most trans fats are from an industrial process, by partially saturating plant oils which breaks certain chemical bonds, making the carbon atoms align straight and then they stay solid at room temperature.
Trans fats are now shunned globally
Trans fats such as margarine were once the so called ‘healthy alternatives’ to butter and lard, which are natural saturated fats. Today globally trans fats are now vilified by health experts. In 2003 an outright ban was placed in Denmark banning the trans fats. The EU is considering a similar ban. In the USA the FDA requires food manufacturers to list the amount of trans fat in their products. However, levels less than 0.5 grams per serving can be labelled as 0 grams and thus ‘trans fat free’. butter are used instead of vegetable shortening.
Fat allowance
The WHO and NIH state that a daily diet should include about 20-30% healthy fat, or no more than 65 grams in a 2,000-calorie die - fat has 9 calories per gram. Of the total fat, 20 grams may be saturated, although less is better.
Large fries at McDonalds contain 30 grams of fat, 6 grams of this will be saturated and 8 grams trans fats. Every gram matters, for replacing just 2% of calories from trans fat with a non-trans unsaturated fat slashes the risk of heart disease by over half, according to Harvard researchers.
Related Article:
Trans Fats are Chemical Poison
Filed under: Health and Diet on March 3rd, 2008
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