Triglycerides - Fats - and Their Derivatives - Mono and Diglycerides

You want to live healthy, so you do your best. Then you run across some words you don't understand. Words like triglyceride. What is a triglyceride? The word triglyceride and the word fat are loosely equivalent. Fatty acids are organic acids derived from animal fat.

History

Fat scraps are melted down and treated with lye (sodium hydroxide) to make soap. Pioneers used wood ashes (in place of the lye, due to its ready availability and lack of cost) to make their soap.

Animal fat isn't the only source of triglycerides, though it is the most common. Plants, too, contain triglycerides, in the form of vegetable oils. Soaps made from vegetable oils tend to be softer, such as Castile soap, made from olive oil.

Brief Chemistry Lesson

Lye (or wood ashes), added to fat, reacts with the fat and removes the portion we call fatty acids, leaving behind a by-product - glycerine. Now let's reverse that process on paper and "put together" a triglyceride. Below are the basic structures:

HO-CH2-CH(OH)-CH2-OH (Glycerine)

R1-COOH, R2-COOH, R3-COOH (Fatty Acids)

Three fatty acids of the same or different carbon skeleton lengths, generally in the 16 to 18 carbon range. R1, R2, and R3 are thus perhaps 15 to 17 carbons long.

React the acids with the glycerine by combining them and removing three water molecules, and you get the triglyceride

R1-COO-CH2-CH(R2-COO)-CH2-OOC-R3 (Triglyceride or Fat)

Modification for Food Use

Fat is an unpopular food item these days, and labels reveal the presence of fats. Fats can be modified by simply removing one or two of the fatty chains, resulting in diglycerides and monoglycerides, respectively, or they may be directly synthesized. Such substances contain one or two of the hydroxyl groups of glycerine (OH groups) and two or one of the fatty chains. These glycerides may thus be useful to blend water-soluble and water-insoluble substances together (emulsification).

Foods utilizing mono and diglycerides are becoming more abundant, and include ice cream, whipped toppings, baked goods, and many others.

Triglycerides - Health Concerns

The American Heart Association provides advice to overweight individuals who may be at risk of heart disease. At the top of their list of things to reduce intake of is fats. Of particular concern are saturated and trans fat. In addition to triglycerides, however, the AHA stresses the necessity to decrease caloric intake of any kind, including, proteins, carbohydrates, and alcohol.

Insight

Healthy eating requires not only restricting the amount of fat, but also the kind of fat, one consumes. Thus different fats are said to possess varying degrees of "saturation". Some fats are saturated completely, some are monounsaturated, and some are polyunsaturated. Especially are such differences noted in vegetable oils used for cooking. So-called "good" fats (current understanding) are usually from among the monounsaturated fats and the polyunsaturated fats.