What Are Trans Fats?

Friday, November 27, 2009

Trans fats are not good for you. They are also known as Trans Fatty Acids or even Partially Hydrogenated Oils. They are created as an industry process by adding hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils to make them more solid. Trans fats give a more desirable taste and texture to foods and help them to last a much longer time. Fast food restaurants deep fry foods in trans fat oils because they can be used in commercial fryers many times over.

Trans fats raise your bad Cholesterol Levels (HDL) and lower your good Cholesterol levels (LDL). Some of the problems that arise from consuming trans fats are an increased risk in developing diabetes, stroke, and heart disease, cancer, low birth weight, obesity, and low immune function.

Here are some foods that contain trans fats: French fries, doughnuts, fried foods, stick margarine, pizza dough, crackers, pastries, cookies, biscuits, pie crusts, imitation cheese, chips, chocolate, shortenings, and vegetable oils such as Crisco.

Now here is the kicker. You want to limit your daily intake of trans fats to 1% of your daily calories. For instance, if you are consuming 2000 calories a day then you want to consume no more than 20 of those calories from trans fats. That’s about 2 grams a day. The way you measure your daily trans fats that you consume is that you look at the nutrition facts on the packaging of the foods that you are eating before you eat them so that you can adequately measure the proper proportion. You would also want to avoid any foods that list hydrogenated oils as an ingredient. When cooking try to use natural vegetable oils or animal-based fats.