You probably know trans fats are bad for our health, and we want to avoid or minimize them. They can raise our LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and lower our HDL (“good”) cholesterol, promote cancer and rapid aging, weaken our immune system, and negatively impact our cell membranes.
Trans fats are mostly found in deep fried foods and “hydrogenated” vegetable oils. Hydrogenated generally means that through a chemical process hydrogen atoms were added to these oils to make them solid instead of liquid.
In 2006, the FDA started requiring food manufacturers to list Trans Fat on the label, but a funny thing happened after that. I’ll bet you $50 you can’t find any foods with more than 0 grams of trans fats on the label!
Here’s an example I just found last week:
Now for fun, I like to look at the ingredients panel on these kind of things.
Here’s what that looks like. Lot’s of ingredients we don’t want, but can you spot the trans-fat?
We can see it’s made with hydrogenated soybean oil (a seed oil), so it most definitely has trans fat in it.
But would you be surprised that the nutrition facts shows 0g of Trans Fat!?
Ok so what’s going on here? Well, if the manufacturer can get the amount of trans fat down to under 500 miligrams (half a gram) per serving, they can legally label it as zero.
So again we have to be our own advocate. Just because a food claims zero trans fat, doesn’t mean it’s true. And in some cases, they’re really trying to trick you – like this tub of Crisco:
Terrible terrible stuff for you. They promote it as a cheap alternative to butter (pro-tip: butter tastes way better and is much healthier for you), and really try to trick you into thinking it’s a good choice by advertising:
How big is a serving?
12 grams (1 Tablespoon). Very small.
And what’s in it?
Fully Hydrogenated Palm Oil. Along with Soybean oil (a seed oil), and things you wouldn’t normally eat: mono and diglycerides (emulsifiers – texture and increased shelf life) and TBHQ (chemical preservative limited by the FDA due to safety concerns including vision disturbances, liver enlargement, neurotoxic effects, convulsions, and paralysis).
A few takeaways: