Health Magazine

The Hidden Fat

By Joe Mullich

 

You’re watching your cholesterol as well as your waistline so no one needs to tell you to eat less saturated fat. That’s a given. So instead of ‘Extreme Butter’ microwave popcorn to accompany your Friday night video, you opt for a lighter rendition. The choices? Jolly Time Butter-Licious (with 1.5 grams of saturated fat and 5 total grams of fat) looks to be the better choice over Newman’s Own Pop’s Corn with Natural Butter Flavor (4.5 grams, all saturated). In reality, though, Butter-Licious is just as likely to clog your arteries as Newman Own’s. The reason: Butter-Licious contains 3 grams of undisclosed trans fatty acids. Although trans fat is a non-saturated oil, researchers believe it may bring even more adverse health effects than its saturated cousin.

You won’t find trans fat on food labels, but stroll through a grocery store and you’ll be surrounded by it. You’ll find it in 70 percent of cake mixes; 75 percent of chips and salty snacks; 95 percent of cookies; 80 percent of frozen breakfast foods, and 40 percent of breakfast cereals. Trans fat may have begun as a non-saturated alternative to lard and butter, but researchers now believe it has even more adverse health consequences than its predecessor. Small amounts of it are found naturally in milk and dairy products, but the majority of trans fats are produced by a man-made process called partial hydrogenation. When hydrogen gas is bubbled through vegetable oil, the oil’s carbon atoms are rearranged into a highly packed structure. This structure is what allows vegetable shortening and stick margarine to remain solid at room temperature and what makes crackers crisp, cakes moist, and pie crusts flakier. Trans fat also keeps cooking oil more stable to prevent it from becoming rancid so it can be reused over and over again in deep frying. (Which is why it’s been a mainstay of the fast food industry until recently.)

At first, trans fat looked like a healthier replacement for saturated fats, like butter, palm and coconut oil, and lard. Now, increasing evidence has shown that trans fat may be an even worse dietary demon. Like saturated fat, trans fat raises “bad” LDL cholesterol. Trans fat also has a tendency to reduce “good” HDL cholesterol, something that saturated fat doesn’t do. Along with this double-whammy, trans fat is believed to inflame and stiffen arteries and raise the blood levels of triglicercides and lipoproteins, two other components suspected to clog arteries. A surprising 1994 study by Harvard School of Public Health attributed more than 30,000 heart attack deaths per year solely to trans fats, and some researchers think even that number low.

Since the Harvard study, health advocates have continued to pressure the food industry to change its policy about informing consumers about trans fat content on nutrition labels. Because of this, snack food giant Frito-Lay and McDonalds recently announced their intention to reduce or eliminated trans fat from some of their products. Others are expected to follow suit. The Food and Drug Administration is on the verge of requiring trans fat to be listed on food labels. Food manufacturers are battling a proposal that labels include a footnote, based on a National Sciences Institute of Medicine recommendation, directing consumers to keep their intake of trans fat as low as possible.

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