**Dear Judy,
I’ve heard that trans fats have been banned in the US in restaurants. What are trans fats and why do we not hear much about them in Australia?
— Mae**
Trans-fats are created through a process called hydrogenation. It was adopted by food manufacturers and used to convert liquid vegetable oils into solid fats such as margarine.
The need arose after nutritional scientists discovered that animal fat, a saturated fat, increased the risk of heart disease. With the best intentions food manufacturers started to play around with vegetable oils, solidifying them to extend their shelf life and make them perform like butter and other solid fats used in baked and fried goods.
What the food manufacturers were unaware of, however, was that the process converted unsaturated fats into trans fats — a worse kind of saturated fat. Trans fats, like saturated fat, are known to raise the levels of bad cholesterol in the bloodstream, but unlike saturated fat, they also decrease levels of the good cholesterol in the bloodstream. Worse still, new research from the Untied States has linked an increased risk of colon cancer to the consumption of trans fats.
While food manufactures are well aware of the issue of trans fats and work to reduce them in consumer goods, particularly non-dairy spreads, there is no legislation around labeling their presence in the foods most likely to contain them.
Food Standards Australia believe that the average Australian’s consumption of trans fats is around 0.6 per cent, less than the World Health Organisation’s recommended upper limit of 1 per cent per day.
The problem however is, as with all statistics, there are people with very healthy diets who skew the data results down. If your diet is full of commercial baked goods such as cheap biscuits and cakes, and you eat a lot of fried fast food, then chances are you are also consuming a lot of trans fats.
While FSANZ continue to sit on the fence with this one, you won’t find information on trans fats on nutritional panels on packaged foods so it’s best to avoid the food they may be found in. At the end of the day, if you want to lose weight and be healthy they are the types of food you should avoid anyway.
A diet of fresh vegetables and fruit, wholegrains, lean meat and fish, legumes and pulses and good fats from unsaturated oil, avocado, nuts and seeds is the one way you can lose weight, avoid trans fats and stay healthy.
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