You won’t find trans fatty acids listed on most
food labels, even though there are more than 40,000 packaged
foods that contain this type of fat. You won’t find it listed because
it’s so bad for you that food manufacturers have fought for years
to keep it off ingredient labels. In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration finally adopted regulations requiring manufacturers
to include trans fat content on their packaging, but the regulations
will be phased in over the next few years. For now, you
have to be a smart food consumer to spot where the danger lies.
Trans fats were invented by grocery manufacturers in the
1950s as a way of appealing to our natural cravings for fatty foods.
But there’s nothing natural about trans fats—they’re cholesterolraising,
heart-weakening, diabetes-causing, belly-building chemicals
that, for the most part, didn’t even exist until the middle of
the last century, and some studies have linked them to an estimated
30,000 premature deaths in this country every year. In one
Harvard study, researchers found that getting just 3 percent of
your daily calories from trans fats increased your risk of heart disease
by 50 percent. Three percent of your daily calories equals
about 7 grams of trans fats—that’s roughly the amount in a single
order of fries. Americans eat an average of between 3 and 10
grams of trans fats every day.
To understand what trans fats are, picture a bottle of vegetable
oil and a stick of margarine. At room temperature, the vegetable
oil is a liquid, the margarine a solid. Now, if you baked cookies
using vegetable oil, they’d be pretty greasy. And who would want
to buy a cookie swimming in oil? So to create cookies—and cakes,
nachos, chips, pies, muffins, doughnuts, waffles, and many, many
other foods we consume daily—manufacturers heat the oil to very
high temperatures and infuse it with hydrogen. That hydrogen bonds with the oil to create an entirely new form of fat—trans
fat—that stays solid at room temperature. Vegetable oil becomes
margarine. And now foods that might normally be healthy—but
maybe not as tasty—become fat bombs.
Since these trans fats don’t exist in nature, your body has a hell
of a time processing them. Once consumed, trans fats are free to
cause all sorts of mischief inside you. They raise the number of LDL
(bad) cholesterol particles in your bloodstream and lower your HDL
(good) cholesterol. They also raise blood levels of other lipoproteins;
the more lipoprotein you have in your bloodstream, the greater
your risk of heart disease. Increased consumption of trans fats has
also been linked to increased risk of diabetes and cancer.
Yet trans fats are added to a shocking number of foods. They
appear on food labels as PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL—usually vegetable
or palm oil. Go look in your pantry and freezer right now,
and you won’t believe how many foods include them. Crackers.
Popcorn. Cookies. Fish sticks. Cheese spreads. Candy bars. Frozen
waffles. Stuffing. Even foods you might assume are healthy—like
bran muffins, cereals, and nondairy creamers—are often loaded
with trans fats. And because they hide in foods that look like
they’re low in fat, such as Wheat Thins, these fats are making you
unhealthy without your even knowing it.
Take control of your trans fat intake. Check the ingredient labels
on all the packaged foods you buy, and if you see PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED
OIL on the label, consider finding an alternative. Even
foods that seem bad for you can have healthy versions: McCains
shoestring french fries, Ruffles Natural reduced-fat chips, Wheatables
reduced-fat crackers, and Dove dark chocolate bars are just
a few of the “bad for you” snacks that are actually free of trans
fats. And remember—the higher up on the ingredients list PARTIALLY
HYDROGENATED OIL is, the worse the food is for you. You might
not be able to avoid trans fats entirely, but you can choose foods
with a minimal amount of the stuff.
The other way to avoid trans fats is to avoid ordering fried
foods. Because trans fats spoil less easily than natural fats and
are easier to ship and store, almost all fried commercial foods are
now fried in trans fats rather than natural oils. Fish and chips,
tortillas, fried chicken—all of it is packed with belly-building
trans fats. Order food baked or broiled whenever possible. And
avoid fast-food joints, where nearly every food option is loaded
with trans fats; drive-through restaurants ought to come complete
with drive-through cardiology clinics.
