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.
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The trans community always gets the short end of the stick don’t they 😞?
Trans is a word root which roughly means “across”. At a molecular level, fat molecules have these long chains of carbon atoms that are lined with hydrogen atoms. If every spot that could have a hydrogen atom in it does have a hydrogen atom, the fat is called a saturated fat. However, if one or more spots have missing hydrogen atoms, the fat is called an unsaturated fat.
The missing hydrogen atoms always come in pairs because that way the carbon atoms will just double bond to each other instead. However, the gaps can come in two different configurations: they can either be on the same side of the chain or *across* from each other. If they are across from each other, this is known as a trans fat and it’s significant because it changes the shape that the molecule will take on, kind of like a crease in a strip of paper.
Trans fats are kind of like defective fats; they occur in nature in small amounts but they are produced in much larger quantities by an industrial process called hydrogenation that humans use to artificially saturate fats. They are incredibly bad for us because since they are mishapen, our bodies’ normal mechanisms for breaking fats down into useable energy don’t work on them. As a result, not only are they totally useless to us as energy, they also take forever to clear out of us, and so eating processed foods that have higher than the natural amount of them causes trans fats to gradually build up in our blood vessels, which can eventually form blockages and lead to heart disease over long periods of time.
Trans fats are one of those rare cases in nutrition where something is just plain bad for you with no qualifications and should be avoided as much as possible. They’re one of the main reasons to avoid eating junk food, because while any hamburger contains mostly the same stuff whether it’s from McDonalds or homemade, the McDonalds one is chock full of flavor enhancers that contain trans fats while your homemade burger is not.
how much trans fat is in regular old butter, for instance? i know i can look this up but i lack the context to assign meaning to the levels
No trans fats are terrible to the point where they’ve been removed from most foods. They are completely manufactured and because of their unique shape, they create plaque buildup in your arteries much faster than other fats do. In terms of calories, they are the same as other fats but in terms of long-term health they are really bad.
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