Foods NOT to eat -- part 2 continued

Welcome to our health & self help blog.

In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.

Today's post: Friday, 6-30-2006

Foods NOT to eat -- part 2 continued

(The foods to virtually never eat & why.)

Transfats, also known as partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Yesterday’s post had how they wound up in so many foods & why they are bad for you.

But I forgot that I read that in addition to sharply increasing the high density, small particle, LDL that triggers cardiovascular disease, eating partially hydrogenated vegetable oils also may help cause or trigger type II diabetes.

This may be found later to be because the people who eat the most partially hydrogenated vegetable oils also tend to do more of the other things that help cause or trigger II diabetes, like eat tons of high fructose corn syrup & very few green & low starch vegetables & never exercise.

But, since partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is not a food humans evolved to eat, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils may also disrupt the normal workings of your cell & sugar processing systems.

And, recent health news says a study found that people with type II diabetes develop heart disease 15 years earlier in their lives than people who are normal.

So eating partially hydrogenated vegetable oils may well cause heart & other cardiovascular diseases TWO ways instead of just one.

As you might guess, I’m convinced that the safe amount of transfats or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils it’s safe to eat is ZERO grams -- ever.

So my reaction that the American Heart Association recently recommended that people limit transfats to one percent of the calories they eat is mixed at best.

The good news is that they had no recommendation against transfats before, so this is a step forward. And, since many Americans eat over five times that much, some of the people who take their advice will damage their health far less than they otherwise would have done.

Secondly, very soon the foods you buy in stores that have ingredient labels will be mandated soon to have a listing for transfats in the food.

This means that a food product that has lots of transfats, will now say so on its label by listing how many grams of transfat a serving of that food contains.

So, you soon will be able read such labels &, if you agree with me on simply NOT eating transfats voluntarily, you can simply not buy such items that list ANY grams of transfat.

The bad news though is that a food with 0.49 grams of transfats per serving will list 0 grams on the label.

Then, if you eat ten or twenty of these servings of that food a week, you’ll actually eat 4.9 to 9.8 grams of transfats that week.

And, since food companies often list serving sizes that fit what a person of about 4 years old actually eats, you could wind up eating 4.9 grams of transfats a day if the food you are eating has a serving size a fifth as large as what you typically eat.

So, what do you look for on the label to avoid this?

The ingredient list !! If a food that bills itself as having zero grams of transfat per serving lists partially hydrogenated vegetable oil as an ingredient, DON’T buy or eat it.

The value of the new grams of transfat labels is to identify foods that either leave out partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in their ingredient list even though partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are actually in the food & to identify foods that are somehow processed in such a way that partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are created in the food even though they weren’t added initially.

Since some companies have decided to start already with the new labels, some foods already have the grams of transfat listed.

When I recently found a food with no partially hydrogenated vegetable oils listed on the ingredient list had several grams of transfats listed, I contacted the company & asked where the transfats they listed came from.

Instead of replying to my question, they mailed me coupons to get more of the product free.

So, I’ve decided it’s simpler to just believe the labels in such a case & NOT buy the product again EVER.

That the company might actually listen to.

The good news is that some companies do realize that their products that contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oils will begin to sell far less as the news gets out about the horrible effects of eating transfats.

And, they likely also realize that foods containing partially hydrogenated vegetable oils may even be outlawed eventually.

So, they are already beginning to offer versions that are either fat free or contain palm oil instead, which nutrition expert & researcher Gene Spiller, PhD, has written is actually somewhat safe to eat & which is cheaper & more shelf stable than other alternatives.

My recommendation is to substitute Superfood whole fruit or nuts or dark chocolate for 90 percent of the snack or treat foods you may have been eating that contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oils & with the remaining ten percent, choose only the new transfat & partially hydrogenated vegetable oil free versions.

That will give you snacks & treats without the heart & other diseases than come with eating partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.