What do a quarter pounder, French fries, breaded fish sticks, roastbeef sandwich, most donuts and ice cream have in common? When you eat them regularly, your arteries will likely to clog much sooner than people who shun them. They pose a threat on the heart and blood vessels.

It’s not so much the saturated fats that they contain. A more dangerous type of fat lurks within every gram of the said food items, and many others that we common eat, including cakes, biscuits pies, and margarine.

Beware of trans fats. This phantom fats teems in food made with partially hydrogenated oils or shortening. We enjoy the good taste of some food items because of the trans fats. It makes pie crusts flakier and French fries crispier.

It’s a phantom because food labels do not indicate the amount of trans fats the food contains. Thus, it’s “invisible” fat. Only your arteries get to feel them, and, when it’s usually already too late, you yourself feel them.

Fast-food Chain

Recently, a giant fast-food multinational chain had to pay a huge amount of money for using trans fats in its food items. Its pledge to spend several million dollars more to educate the public on the health hazards posed by trans fats and how to avoid them.

A noble commitment, but it could be a little too late. Countless people must already be suffering from complications due to clogging of their arteries, and countless others could have been doomed to a lifelong intake of medicines for fast-food and trans fat-related diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol problems.

“It’s like a secret killer,” says Walter Willet, head of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health. “With saturated fat, at least food labels tell you how much you’re eating. With trans, it’s anybody’s guess.”

The local Bureau of Food and Drugs should require fast-food chains ad manufacturers of biscuits, cookies, cakes and ice cream to indicate on the labels a fair estimate of how much trans and saturated fats they contain.

Consumers can at least make a more intelligent decision weather or not to regularly eat these food items. If they disregard the warning on how much artery-clogging fat that food has, then it’s their own lookout. If you eat trans fat-laden food items daily, you’re not much better off than a smoker. And BFAD and other food agencies should set limits not only on saturated fats but also on trans fats.

	Trans fats created when oils are partially hydrogenated.

No cholesterol

Hydrogenation makes oils more stable and turns liquid oil into stick margarine. So read the labels of your favorite food items and avoid the thousands of foods with “partially hydrogenated oil.”

Watch out too for tricky claims of “no cholesterol” of “low cholesterol” in food items. They may refer to the saturated fat contents. A low saturated fat, but high trans fat content may make the food item jus as much a health risk as those high in saturated fats.

Since the early 1990’s, this was an issue for Mc-Donald’s when it claimed that its French fries were cooked in cholesterol-free, 100-percent vegetable oil. They stopped the practice of frying their potatoes, fish and chicken in beef tallow. Consumer advocacy groups, however, said the switch was not to pure vegetable shortening.

But aren’t vegetable oils healthy? Yes, vegetable oils are rich in polyunsaturated fats that help prevent heart attacks, but they turn rancid quickly when they are removed from vegetable. The unstable polyunsaturated fats are therefore to the very stable partially hydrogenated fat. Fast-food chains buy them and use them.

Officially, fast food giants use little lard, butter or oils containing primarily saturated fats but in their place, they use partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. It makes French fried\s crispy, but it also makes a middle- aged fast-food fan a prime candidate for heart attacks and certain types of cancers. Even fish can become an artery’s nightmare when fried in oil which I trans fats.

So the next time you buy fast-food, and other deep fried food, think of the phantom that could kill you slowly with every bite you take.

Related Information:

· Comparison of Dietary Fats

· Fatty Acid Composition of Various Fats and Oils