Avoiding trans fat

Many scientists believe trans fat is the worst type of fat. Trans fat — also known as trans-fatty acids raise your bad cholesterol (LDL) and lower your good cholesterol (HDL). A high  level of LDL cholesterol together with a low level of HDL cholesterol increases your risk of getting heart diseases, the leading cause of death recently.

What is trans fat?

Some meat and dairy products may have small amounts of natural trans fat. However, most trans fat is created through an industrial process of adding hydrogen to vegetable oil, causing the oil to probably solidify at room temperature. This kind of partially hydrogenated oil is less likely to degenerate, which is why foods made with it have a much further expiration date. Restaurants use partially hydrogenated vegetable oil to fry foods so that they will not have to change it often.

Where can you find trans fat?

Baked foods.

Most of the cakes, cookies, pie crusts and crackers you eat contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.  Another source of trans fat is ready-made frosting.

Snacks.

Potato, corn and tortilla chips are usually full of trans fat. And popcorn is only healthy if it is not cooked or flavored with trans fat.

Fried foods.

Needless to say, any food fried with partially hydrogenated oil contain trans fat.

Read the labels.

One of the best way to avoid trans fat is to check the labels when you shop for food. The US regulation allows the food label to read 0 grams trans fat if there are under 0.5 grams of the infamous fat in a serving. Also check for partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is an indicator of trans fat in your food.

Keep your trans fat consumption as low as possible.

Trans fat, particularly the manufactured version found in partially hydrogenated vegetable oil has no known health benefit supported by science. The Department of Agriculture advises people to eat as least trans fat as possible. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) no longer recognizes partially hydrogenated vegetable oil as safe. Its involvement in food preparation should be completely banned over the next few years.

To keep yourself safe, you should be aware of the harmful effects of trans fat and other types of fat as well. A common substitution of trans fat is saturated fat, which also raises your LDL cholesterol. A healthy diet should contain less than 35% fat, and particularly less than 10% of saturated fat.