Today’s interesting fact has to do with transfats.

Although I’ve done transfats in the past, there is plenty more to be said about them.

Transfats are placed in foods by food manufactures to extend shelf life.  If a cake or loaf of bread will last two weeks on the shelf instead of two days, the shop wins, the manufacturer wins and only the purchaser and consumer loses.

Transfats  are mostly man-made fats, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, that are made by bubbling hydrogen gas through oil in the presence of a nickel catalyst.  This turns the liquid oil into a solid fat.

Transfats have been linked to most of the health issues long thought to be caused by saturated fats: heart disease, cardiac arrests, strokes, plaque in the blood vessels, high blood pressure and numerous other issues.  One way transfat apparently does this by somehow increasing bad and decreasing the good cholesterols as well as getting deposited on the insides of our blood vessels and hardening our arteries.

One way of limiting the transfats in your diet is to know what the ingredients are called in food speak, the way the manufacturers rename transfats to keep you from knowing they are in your food.

If you find hydrogenated vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, vegetable shortening or margarine in the list of ingredients, this is  most likely referring to the transfats within the product.  Some manufacturers have started using just shortening to refer to tranfat.

Some products in the UK can apparently have up to 40% transfat in them.

Me, I’m reading the ingredients from now on a bit more carefully.