What is So Bad About Trans Fat? Nutritionist Grace Ong Shares the Facts

Recently, New York becomes the first city in USA to ban trans fat at restaurants. From the corner pizzeria to high bakeries, all food businesses have to eliminate trans fat from their kitchens by July 2008. This means that most frying oils in the market would be barred from commercial usage. New York's move to ban trans fats has mostly been applauded by health and medical groups. As people become aware of the harmful nature of trans fats and how they are linked to heart and other life-threatening diseases, they begin suing food companies, especially the fast food joints. With the New York's ban, more states are considering doing likewise. This ripple effect will not just affect USA but it will touch the shores of most nations. So, why all the fuss about trans fat? What is trans fat, anyway?

Trans Fat Is Bad Fat Consumers regularly purchase foods that have at least one of these four types of fats: monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, saturated fat, and trans fat. Many of these are packaged in such a way that you will find it hard to distinguish the "good" fats from the "bad" fats. Monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat are the "good guys". Are saturated fats then the "bad guys"? No! For example, coconut oil, with its medium-chain fatty acid or triglycerides, is one of the "good" saturated fats. Palm oil is another "good" saturated fat. Generally, animal fats have long-chain fatty acid and are considered as "bad" saturated fats. However, the most dangerous of all "bad" fats is Trans Fat or Trans Fatty Acid.

Even though there are some natural trans fats in milk and meats, most of the trans fats consumed today are artificially created. What the food technologists do is to take perfectly healthy natural oil, such as soybean oil, and process it into "killer" oil. This process, known as partial hydrogenation, takes naturally liquefied oil and makes it solid. This process destroys the nutritional value of the oils but gives baked products a longer shelf-life and cooking oils a longer fry-life.

Silent Killer More than 40 percent of American deaths are caused by heart diseases. Before the introduction of trans fat into their daily diets, Americans had lesser heart problems in spite of a diet higher in saturated fats. Experts are now pointing to trans fat as the primary health culprit. They also discovered that trans fat could affect the activities of important enzyme system that metabolises chemical carcinogens and drugs. Without these metabolism activities, healthy cells become sick and cancerous.

Are You Still Consuming Trans Fat? Trans fat is also known as the "phantom fat" because in it is seldom mentioned in processed foods and never mentioned at all in restaurants. When buying manufactured foods, you should check for "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" on the labels. Margarines, cookies, crackers, potato chips, snack chips and pastries are some of the products that are high in trans fat. Even frozen pies and pastries have their fair shares of trans fats. In Malaysia, you can definitely find trans fat in most conventional cooking oils. Any foods that are cooked with such oils would be contaminated with trans fat. Go slow on deep fried foods such as french fries, fried chickens, fried kuay teow (fried Chinese rice noodles), goreng pisang (fried banana fritters) mee goreng (Indian fried noodles), doughnuts, etc. Keep trans fats out of your daily diet and you should stay healthy for a long time.