Why do the trans fat and saturated fats not add up to the total fats on a nutritional label? Are there other types of fat?

Question

Pure curiosity, and the title is pretty much my question. I’ve noticed that nutritional labels (USA) say something like 0g of trans fat, 10g of saturated fat (50% daily value)… but then it lists the total fat as 20g and only 26% of the daily value. 50% obviously doesn’t equal 26% and 10g doesn’t equal 20g so it must mean there are way more types of fat out there than trans and saturated?

If there are other fats, why do labels not provide a breakdown of the others? Why are saturated fats special enough to be listed?

Thanks!

In: Other

Answer 1

Total fat, as the name implies, doesn’t differentiate between the different kinds. So if all you eat are saturated fats, you’ll be technically OK on the total, but way over the RDA of saturated fat.

It’s kind of like having a 2000 daily calorie allowance, it wouldn’t be OK if it all came from eating a bowl of sugar.

And yes, there are other fats, *un*saturated being the most obvious example. Those don’t get spelled out separately because unlike trans and saturated they’re the “good” fats. Typically, those would be liquid fats, like olive oil and so on, whereas saturated fats are solid at room temperature. (butter, lard, etc.)

(And trans fats are for the most part unsaturated fats that were artificially processed to make them solid, like butter substitutes. Some are naturally occurring, but the amount is negligible compared to the cheap artificial shortenings in processed food.)

(Air quotes around “good” because any fat is very calorie dense, it’s actually the most calories-per-gram of any food you can eat, so large amounts of it aren’t going to be amazing for you in terms of overall caloric intake.)

But there’s also other minor sources of lipids and cholesterol, etc. (Anything you eat that’s made of cells will include some of those, since they’re components of the cell membrane.)

Also, the reality is a little more complicated than the simple ELI5 explanation, most (probably all, actually?) naturally-occurring fats are a mixture of several different kinds of fatty acids and the proportions determine the consistency, melting point, flavor, etc.