What are the transfats and why are they bad?
Sue Brennan: The trans fats and how do we get those in our diets. Where are they coming from?
They ended up in the food supply because the food manufacturers wanted to
stabilize fats, so they stayed in a form that wouldn’t spoil. They took liquid,
vegetable oils, and they added hydrogen compounds. I won’t go into all the
chemistry of how you take a liquid and make it a solid, but adding those extra
hydrogens onto the carbon bonds, formed a solid substance. Then it could be in
the food packaging—and often they taste very good. But what the problem is, it’s
a foreign fat to our body. We have enzymes that work on the fats. When they have
these foreign fats, they’re not folded right, so the enzymes have trouble breaking
them down. It takes a lot more energy and you have a lot more problems with
cholesterol levels, and a whole cascade of events can occur if you get a lot of
those in your diet. Small amounts are fine. The right kinds of fats are very
important and I don’t want to scare people off thinking, oh they can’t have any fat
in their diet. They need good fat.
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