Are Trans fats really that bad for us compared to other fats or is it just a case of diet culture throwing a random aspect of food under the bus like they did with Carbs?

Question

I will never forgive the diet industry for telling me potatoes were bad for me, once I stopped caring about fad shit and just eating at a deficit (including at least one baked potato a day) the pounds absolutely melted off.

It got me thinking about other foods that the government / diet companies have said are bad. Were trans fats actually a big problem? The ban certainly hasn’t done much for the obesity epidemic.

In: Other

Answer 1

Trans fats are actually pretty bad for you, mostly because they’re artificial and therefore not something the body evolved to handle in large amounts. But the risk doesn’t have that much to do with obesity; it’s more about heart disease.

Naturally occurring fats are a mixture of “saturated fatty acids” (which tend to be solid at room temperature; butter and coconut oil have lots of saturated fat) and “cis-unsaturated fatty acids” (which tend to be liquid at room temperature; cooking oil has lots of unsaturated fat). Trans fat, more formally “trans-unsaturated fatty acids”, do exist naturally in food but only in small amounts.

In the early 1900s, a process called hydrogenation was invented that would convert unsaturated fat to saturated fat. This seemed great, since it allowed cheap oils to be turned into fat that stays solid at room temperature. But a side effect is that some of the cis-unsaturated fat is turned into trans-unsaturated fat (“trans fat”), which is unsaturated but kind of behaves like saturated fat in food. For a long time people thought this was a good thing, since conventional wisdom was that unsaturated fat is better for you than saturated fat. So trans fat seemed like a good thing: you get fat that is solid at room temperature like saturated fat while still technically being unsaturated!

Eventually more studies were done on the effects of trans fats, and scientists realized that eating lots of trans fat strongly increases the risk of heart disease, and weakly increases the risk of various other diseases like obesity. The body can handle small amounts ok, but not the larger amounts that people who eat a lot of junk food with trans fats would get.

So you’re right, getting rid of trans fats hasn’t done much for the obesity epidemic, but it also wasn’t really expected to help much with that.

EDIT: fixed mistake as pointed out by /u/tamebeverage