Why remove trans fats from your food & drink....

Today's Post, Thursday, 4-30-2009

Trans fats, also called transfats, and the hydrogenated vegetable oils that most of them come from, sharply increase the small particle LDL that causes heart disease in the blood of people unlucky enough to ingest them, research has found.

That means that eating or drinking something that contains them is an excellent way to ensure you'll get things like heart attacks, strokes, peripheral artery disease or PAD in your legs, erectile dysfunction, and vascular dementia.

Transfats are like heart attack starter pills. They make people more likely to get heart attacks and get them at a younger age.

Small particle LDL is quite literally small enough to fit into the chinks in your blood vessel walls. When they do that, they tend to get stuck and build up. This process also tends to cause inflammation.

So, transfats are many times better at CAUSING heart disease than taking the largest doses of statin drugs available are at preventing problems from heart disease. And the multiplier is large. My guess is that transfats are over 50 times more effective at causing heart problems than statin drugs are at preventing them.

If you want to avoid heart disease and the other diseases this process causes, guess how much of this stuff it's desirable for you to eat.

A little bit some days instead of a lot every day?

Just a few grams a day?

Once or twice a week?

Never-- none at all?

If you guessed just a little bit most days instead of a lot every day, or a similar answer, you'll lose. You won't pay much attention to avoiding transfats and the hydrogenated vegetable oils that contain them. You'll wind up ingesting a lot and as one Olympic Champion once put it, "Your blood vessels will fill up with crud."

The right answer is: "Never-- none at all." -- or as close to it as you can possibly manage while making special effort not to ingest any.

Is this still going to be the case a week or a month after your read this post?

Absolutely it is.

So, the only way to avoid the horrible effects of ingesting transfats, is to learn how to do it virtually 100 %of the time; and then do so, starting immediately; and simply keep doing it.

It was in the health news earlier this week that when there are news stories that mostly say transfats are bad for you, people do eat less of them for a while. But in a month or so, they eat just as much as they did before.

Yikes! Ouch! Oops !! & similar comments.

The transfats are just as deadly as a slow poison and heart & circulation destroyer a few weeks after the article appeared as it was right after it was published.

So, what happened?

First, the articles likely didn't tell people that every time you ingest the stuff, you are causing plaque build up in your blood vessels or make clear to them that if this continues what it will do to them.

But, of more importance, the articles failed to cover what transfats are in and how many things they have been in until recently & still are, unfortunately. If you are not aware you're eating it, it's definitely much harder to stop doing it!

So, here's what transfats and hydrogenated oils are in:

1. Shortening, the most prevalent brand name is Crisco, is the very most concentrated source because it's virtually 100 % partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. So never buy any or cook with it. Unfortunately, most commercially baked pie crusts are made with shortening. Its cheaper and easier to cook with than butter; and the shelf life of the crust is longer.

So, if you eat a piece of pie that is not homemade & where you know butter was used by the cook to make the crust, you'll do yourself a huge health favor to NOT eat the crust and only eat the filling.

The same thing is true of virtually all cookies, cracker, snack foods, donuts, and other desserts and baked goods that you buy in stores or bakeries.

The only good news is that these same foods tend to make you fat and cause type 2 diabetes and cost more than many people realize if you eat them every day. (One woman who was making a successful effort to lose more than 30 pounds of fat, discovered that by no longer buying these foods or soft drinks, it cut her monthly grocery costs for her family in half even though she had to buy more vegetables and fruit.)

2. Partially hydrogenated oils are sometimes in a huge list of foods that can be make without them. So, you have to read the labels to know.

The fastest way to start is to read the transfat grams listed. (It turns out that the label can say 0 grams per serving and actually be .49 grams which means that if you eat 5 servings, you'll actually get 2.45 grams of transfats!) But look there first & refuse to buy if you do NOT see zero grams. (One kind of all beef canned chili I once liked had 3 grams of transfat per serving! I've never bought or eaten it since.)

Then look at the ingredients listed. If ANY fully hydrogenated oils, sometimes called interesterified oils or fats, or partially hydrogenated oils of any kind are listed, the food has transfats or even worse health effects. So do NOT eat it or buy it.

And, you virtually have to check everything except meat, fish, chicken, eggs, milk, and produce. If it has a label, it will pay you to check it for transfats above zero &/or any hydrogenated oils in the ingredients list.

Candy bars, peanut butter, ice cream, bread, & microwave popcorn are only a few examples. You can get these foods made with transfats or hydrogenated oils or without for the most part. (I'm not sure about microwave popcorn. But you can buy the other foods from companies that use safer and/or more traditional ingredients instead.)

3. Margarine is very similar to shortening. Its main ingredient is partially hydrogenated oil. Some kinds have less. But the kinds that have none are really margarine substitutes. For most people, it's better for you to use real butter but eat it less often in smaller amounts than to use margarine.

And, using extra virgin olive oil or almond butter is even better for you. So is eating avocados or guacamole or eating raw nuts.

It also helps to avoid margarine &/or to eat less butter to never have refined grain bread or almost never eat it & to not eat much whole grain bread. Doing those things cuts your high glycemic carbs and helps you avoid being fat and getting type 2 diabetes as well. So you get double health benefits by eating less bread and only using some butter or olive oil on the bread you do eat while only eating bread that's whole grain and has no hydrogenated oils in it.

(Note that some margarines contain sterols. So eating them does lower cholesterol some. But you can take sterol supplements that have no hydrogenated oils at all and lower your cholesterol even more. So get your sterols by themselves and pass on the margarine that ruins some of their positive effect.)

For some people, avoiding these things that transfats are in will change what they eat a lot. But the health benefits make it well worth doing. And, for such people, they'll find they save money at the grocery store also.