As a member of Fast Food Nation, do you ever worry about trans fats in your diet?

Similar questions: member Fast Food Nation worry trans fats diet.

I won't touch them. I studied nutrition in college in the early '80s and we learned all about the chemistry of trans fats. Fats are essentially long carbon-hydrogen chains (with an acceptable oxygen molecule thrown in here or there).

If all of the carbons have a matching hydrogen, it is a saturated fat. If two of the carbons don't have a hydrogen, they bond with each other instead of a hydrogen and thus create what is called a double bond. Now you have a monounsaturated fat.

If four, six or eight of the carbons don't have a matching hydrogens, you have a polyunsaturated fat (2, 3 or 4 double bonds). So if you put any oil with a double bond on the shelf, oxygen will find those double bonds and attach to the carbons to create an aldehyde. We call this rancid.So to prevent rancidity of oils on the shelf and to make the oil more solid, manufacturers add not oxygen, of course, but hydrogen so those poor carbons who don't have a hydrogen now have one.

This is called hydrogenation. But if you read the label it says "partially hydrogenated." That's because if every carbon had a hydrogen, it would become a saturated fat.

Sounds okay, right? But something funny happens on the way to hydrogenation. Almost all unsaturated fats in nature have the hydrogens on the carbons adjacent to the double bond stick out on the same side of the fat molecule.

(This is called cis. ) During processing, the double bonds that do not add hydrogens may shift -- something like being broken and reformed.As this happens, the hydrogens become fixed in the trans position -- across from each other. This changes the molecule from a horseshoe shape to an extended shape (kind of like pointing one of the ends of the horseshoe from left to right) that will fit together differently with other molecules in cell membranes.

So after I learned this, I cut way back on trans fats.It just seemed to me that it wasn't real smart to be eating fats that didn't fit with my cells. Kind of like mixing, oh, say, 10% of the pieces from one jigsaw puzzle with another. Years later, I told my husband about this and he was absolutely horrified!

He absolutely refused to eat any trans fats at all. He reads every label. Even now when companies have to label their products if they have 1 gram or more of trans fats, it the label say "partially hydrogenated" he knows that this means it has trans fats although less than 1 gram per serving.

I went along with him because I knew it was healthier. After a year of no trans fats I had my cholesterol checked as part of my yearly check up and it had plummeted. I have read nothing that says eliminating trans fats will lower cholesterol, but I believe it will.

I'm sorry if I got too technical, but this is a bright bunch and I think as people understand what is happening, they will stop eating trans fats and everyone will be healthier. Sources: Understanding Nutrition, Whitney and Hamilton, 3rd Edition, West Publishing Company, 1977 constance2u's Recommendations Understanding Nutrition (with CD-ROM and InfoTrac) (Understanding Nutrition) Amazon List Price: $99.95 Used from: $4.97 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 16 reviews) This is an updated version of my textbook.

Nope I'm responsibe for what I put in my body. No Trans Fat, No It's pretty easy to avoid. Mf .

Just wondering if you were some kind of junk food fanatic. I noticed that you have a ton of questions and each one is about junk food! Just curious.

":I try to stay away from junk food however I grew up on coke and chips so it's a real effort for me.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.