Some Trans Fats May Actually Be Good for You

When I started in the restaurant business, we cooked our fried foods in an oil that was part fully hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard, or animal fat. It certainly made the foods taste good, but it was really bad for your health.

First we eliminated the animal fat because nobody wants to fry like grandma did with leftover bacon grease in this health conscious age. Then we found out that the vegetable oil had something in it that was even worse than the animal fat: trans fats.

The trans fats were so bad that some cardiologists said that an extra 200,000 people died each year from consuming it. They even outlawed it in parts of California and in New York City. A whole lot of packaged products that were fried put "no trans fats" across the front of the package in big red letters.

But some trans fats are still found in meat and dairy products. It's almost impossible to get them out. But they may not be so bad after all. According to CNN:

"For those trying to eat a healthy diet, whole-fat dairy and trans fats are usually not on the menu '" at least, not yet. Scientists have narrowed in on a trans fat component found mainly in dairy fat that may ward off type 2 diabetes and protect cardiovascular health."

Further research is needed, but it seems that fats may play a more complex role in human health than we previously thought they did. It seems that people with higher levels of a substance called trans-palmitoleic acid had a lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. They also had lower levels of the bad cholesterol and higher levels of the good kind.

But there is an important distinction here. The trans fats that are good for you are the naturally-occurring ones found in dairy products, not the artificial ones that were put in shortening and prepackaged products to make them last longer on the shelves. These are the types of trans fats that will clog your arteries and give you a heart attack.

The beneficial trans fats in milk comprise only 0.2 of the product. They are actually byproducts of digestion in the cow that are caused by bacteria, and somehow they make their way into the milk.

But the researchers aren't advocating that you go out and start drinking heavy cream. The best diet to avoid diabetes and heart disease is still the low-fat and low calories one, but there should be some fat incorporated into your diet, just not that much.

I still think that the best diet for an otherwise healthy person is the one that author Michael Pollan advocates. He says to eat a balanced diet, mostly vegetables and fruit, with some meat and dairy products, but no heavily processed foods. Plus, if your great, great, grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, then don't eat it.

Source: http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/20/can-a-fat-protect-you-from-diabetes/?hpt=Sbin