The hidden killer
By Damayanti Datta and Samantha Heller
India is waking up to a new threat. The government has made it compulsory for food manufacturers to mention trans fat content on labels. Why? Because it can push you to an early death.
Twist the top cookie to the right, the bottom to the left and pull apart. Now, before you scrape that sweet cream filling into your mouth with your top teeth as you’ve done hundreds of times since you were five, take a good look at some very bad fat.
It’s called trans fat, and chances are you’ve never heard of it because you won’t find it on most food labels. Trans fat is simply vegetable oil infused with hydrogen. It is used in thousands of common foods, from cookies to jalebis, French fries to samosas. Vegetable oil seems innocent enough, until you learn that that the hydrogenation turns it into a form that’s difficult to digest. If saturated animal fats are unhealthy, trans fats are worse.
Trans fat can clog arteries. It can weaken your immune system. It can cause diabetes. And that’s just the beginning.
Harvard scientists estimate that trans fats may contribute to more than 30,000 premature deaths each year.
Trans fat 101
To understand how trans fats got such a stranglehold on the Indian food supply, you need to know a bit about their history.
|Know the good fat from the bad |
Fats, generally found in animal products, are solid at room temperature. Diets high in saturated fat can cause coronary heart disease and increase cholesterol levels.
Primarily found in vegetable products and usually liquid at room temperature. Found to lower cholesterol levels, they are healthier than saturated variety.
Created by partially hydrogenating plant oils, these may be monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats and are considered harmful for health.
The story begins in the 1950s, when scientists first made the link between saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease. After the discovery, manufacturers scrambled to find a way to cut saturated fats from their products. Their immediate solution: a decades-old process called partial hydrogenation, which was developed in the early 1900s but had yet to catch on in the food industry.
During partial hydrogenation, vegetable oils are combined with hydrogen and heated to extreme temperatures. As the molecules in the oil warm up, they bond with the hydrogen, creating a new structure called trans fatty acid. The result is the transformation of liquid into solid—vegetable oil into vanaspati.
The second time around, hydrogenated oil was an out-of-the-box hit. Restaurants liked it because they could fill their fry vats with the stuff and keep it hot all day without smoking up their kitchens. Hydrogenated fats were also cheaper than butter and had a longer shelf life—so street food vendors could not only use the same oil over and over, but also buy the stuff in bulk, without worrying about spoilage.
Hydrogenated oils helped the junk food industry hit jackpot. Trans fats made chips crispier and let manufacturers add the great taste of fat to places it hadn’t been before.
While normal vegetable oils would have slowly leaked out of cookies and chips, leaving a greasy mess behind, trans fats were different. Since trans fat molecules turn solid at room temperature, manufacturers were now able to lock fat into their food, giving it an injection
of fat—and flavour—that couldn’t be dabbed away.
Combine this with the longer shelf life of foods made with hydrogenated oil rather than butter, and it’s no wonder that trans fats helped the junk-food market explode. Researchers estimate that 33 per cent of India’s youth take trans fat-loaded food three times a week.
Anatomy of a killer
Since trans fats don’t occur widely in nature, your body has a harder time processing them than it does other types of fat. So, while you may stop thinking about your morning paratha the second you shake the crumbs off your tie, the trans fats linger on inside your body. Their first target? Your heart.
“Besides increasing the number of LDL (bad) cholesterol and triglyceride particles in the bloodstream, trans fats also lower your HDL (good) cholesterol,” says Bruce Holub, PhD, a professor of nutrition at the University of Guelph in Canada. “Trans fats also increase blood levels of a compound called lipoprotein a. The more of this you have in your system, the greater your risk of developing heart disease.”
In an 80,000-person study, Harvard researchers found that getting just 3 per cent of your daily calories from trans fats increases your risk of heart disease by up to 50 per cent.
The researchers also found that people with the highest daily intakes of trans fats were the most likely to develop diabetes.
Combine those studies with reports that trans fats may promote muscle loss and could even increase your risk of cancer, and it’s no wonder the recommended daily intake of trans fats determined by the World Health Organisation stands at just 5gm a day.