Hello! I was wondering if anyone can shed some light on this question that has confused me for a while.
Transfats/partially hydrogenated oil , as far as I am aware, were banned and companies were told to remove them from products. Which sounds good, however I have noticed that many companies started using ingredients such as palm oil, and mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (e471). Which, when I have done a bit of research, are sometimes said to contain trans fats that don’t need to be declared. This would mean that transfats are still there right?
Obviously we don’t want to eat too many processed foods anyway, but sometimes if you are at a restaurant, or in a pinch, or just want some whipped cream (that often contains e471) then are you still eating transfats in products with these ingredients? Or is palm oil and e471 much better to consume than transfats/partially hydrogenated oil?
TLDR/ are transfats/partially hydrogenated oils just as bad as their replacements?
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Thanks for any info or insights!
I think some of them just dropped it below the reporting level.
If you’re at a restaurant that appears to make food from food, vs pulling it out of a freezer and dumping it in a fryer, I’d go for the whipped cream.
Totally agree with your stance on processed foods. Plus I have an ethical issue with palm oil.
Manufacturers are allowed to claim a food doesn’t have trans fats as long as it has less than 0.5 g of trans fats in a standard serving.
You can’t actually rely on the nutrition label. You have to look at the ingredient list and look for the words “Cream”, “Shortening”, or “Hydrogenated.”
If you see any of these three words, the food in question has trans fats. No matter what the label says.
While manufacturers have been ordered to remove trans fats from their products, we’re still in the phase out period so foods that existed before the ban can still have them. Also the trans fat that appears in dairy products are considered natural and relatively harmless so the ban doesn’t apply to them.
In the US Industrial Trans-Fats (natural trans fats exist, these are fine and actually are great for you) have been banned effective January 2018.
But of course that doesn’t reduce the need for those products to require another ingredient that replaces the purpose of the industrial trans-fats. So yes it got replaced with something.
If we are talking about improving health, limit your consumption of processed foods. They are always going to be filled with garbage that harms your health. Even if we removed the industrial trans-fats from it.
If you do consume such in moderation, don’t worry too much about it.
Even if they have been eliminated, there is something else in your processed food that is terrible for that you haven’t heard about. When one poison is outlawed new ones are added.
Just don’t eat processed food.
The basic answer is that these replacement oils are not as bad as TFA but they should still be eaten in moderation.
https://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/070114p20.shtml - “Substituting Palm Oil for Trans Fat” is a good article that details a few of your questions.
Here is another good article detailing the difference between ruminant (natural) and industrially-produced trans fatty acids if you want to get really scientific (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596737/).
I mean, read the ingredients label. It’s not exactly rocket science. You can see if something was made with partially hydrogenated oils….
You can literally look up the chemical structure of whatever oil or fat is in your food, and see if it’s cis or trans.