Sport Trans Fat vs. Saturated Fat
- Thread starter HIIT4life
- Start date
Sport Fitness
trans fats are a lot worse and should be avoided. A diet high it saturated fats can lead to things like increased chances of heart diesease, however that said saturated fats still need to be in your diet in controlled amount.
As to the actaul technical details of why I will leave that to someone a bit nerdier then me to go into.
As to the actaul technical details of why I will leave that to someone a bit nerdier then me to go into.
Ill be the one to go nerdy 
First off, Our body needs both saturated and unsaturated fats.
What is a saturated fat? a SATfat is like a sponge in a way in that it soaks up and retains as much (Hydrogen) as it possibly can.
What is an Unsaturated Fat? A UnSatFat is the oposite of a saturated fat in that it does Not contain or retain any Hydrogen.
What are SatFats good for? well put simply they help Stabilize celll membranes
What are UnSatFats good for? These help cell membranes be more "flexible" and help with communication."not verbal lol"
What are Trans Fats? Trans fats occur when the Food industry wants to prolong the shelf life of a PUSF "polyunsaturated-Fatty-Acid" by using a special process called "Hydrogenation" that makes the fat soak up more hydrogen and unsaturated fatty acids will be transformed into saturated ones. making the product last longer at an expense to our health.
Now i can get even more technical if need be. however i feel that answers the question well.
SideNote,
Sat and unSat fats are needed in the body equall as much however at different levels, unSat fats should be consumed more so then SAt fats but do not cut Sat fats out all together,
Trans fats should be AVOIDED at all cost they serve NO purpose in the body but to do harm.
First off, Our body needs both saturated and unsaturated fats.
What is a saturated fat? a SATfat is like a sponge in a way in that it soaks up and retains as much (Hydrogen) as it possibly can.
What is an Unsaturated Fat? A UnSatFat is the oposite of a saturated fat in that it does Not contain or retain any Hydrogen.
What are SatFats good for? well put simply they help Stabilize celll membranes
What are UnSatFats good for? These help cell membranes be more "flexible" and help with communication."not verbal lol"
What are Trans Fats? Trans fats occur when the Food industry wants to prolong the shelf life of a PUSF "polyunsaturated-Fatty-Acid" by using a special process called "Hydrogenation" that makes the fat soak up more hydrogen and unsaturated fatty acids will be transformed into saturated ones. making the product last longer at an expense to our health.
Now i can get even more technical if need be. however i feel that answers the question well.
SideNote,
Sat and unSat fats are needed in the body equall as much however at different levels, unSat fats should be consumed more so then SAt fats but do not cut Sat fats out all together,
Trans fats should be AVOIDED at all cost they serve NO purpose in the body but to do harm.
Ill be the one to go nerdy
First off, Our body needs both saturated and unsaturated fats.
What is a saturated fat? a SATfat is like a sponge in a way in that it soaks up and retains as much (Hydrogen) as it possibly can.
What is an Unsaturated Fat? A UnSatFat is the oposite of a saturated fat in that it does Not contain or retain any Hydrogen.
What are SatFats good for? well put simply they help Stabilize celll membranes
What are UnSatFats good for? These help cell membranes be more "flexible" and help with communication."not verbal lol"
What are Trans Fats? Trans fats occur when the Food industry wants to prolong the shelf life of a PUSF "polyunsaturated-Fatty-Acid" by using a special process called "Hydrogenation" that makes the fat soak up more hydrogen and unsaturated fatty acids will be transformed into saturated ones. making the product last longer at an expense to our health.
Now i can get even more technical if need be. however i feel that answers the question well.
SideNote,
Sat and unSat fats are needed in the body equall as much however at different levels, unSat fats should be consumed more so then SAt fats but do not cut Sat fats out all together,
Trans fats should be AVOIDED at all cost they serve NO purpose in the body but to do harm.
OK, I'm going to be ultra-nerdy and correct silent by pointing out that unsaturated fats do indeed have hydrogens. It's just that with an unsaturated carbon chain there is a double bond existing between two carbons. Which is why it is not saturated with hydrogens. Depending on how many double bonds there are, are what make it monounsaturated or polyunsaturated.
FURTHER:
Yes, trans fats are manmade from the food industry but they do not make unsaturated fats into saturated fats. The unsaturated fats stay unsaturated with a double bond in the carbon chain (which is why scientist thought that they were healthier than saturated fats years ago). However, the configuration of the molecular structure is altered since it is no longer in a Cis-configuration (hydrogens on the double bonded carbons on the same side) but now in a trans configuration (hydrogens on the double bonds on opposite sides). This is a fatty link that our body does not know how to process because we would never have to deal with in in nature. Basically like throwing a wrench into the machine (I heard that analogy somewhere, can't remember where).
Sorry Silent, this person probably didn't ask to know all this and just wanted to know which one was healthier. But in case anyone was paying attention who knows basic chemistry I figured I would point out some of the fine details.
~Nicole
lol damn you did go super nerdy, nice job
although, Hydrogenation of an unsaturated fatty acid refers to the addition of hydrogen atoms to the acid, causing double bonds to become single ones as carbon atoms acquire new hydrogen partners (to maintain four bonds per carbon atom). Full hydrogenation results in a molecule containing the maximum amount of hydrogen (in other words the conversion of an unsaturated fatty acid into a saturated one
.Trans fats
Increases LDL cholesterol(bad cholesterol), as well as raises your risk for atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)
It has also been noted they can delay development of infants
As well as many more bad affects on the body (even links to heighten cancer risk)
lol damn you did go super nerdy, nice job
although, Hydrogenation of an unsaturated fatty acid refers to the addition of hydrogen atoms to the acid, causing double bonds to become single ones as carbon atoms acquire new hydrogen partners (to maintain four bonds per carbon atom). Full hydrogenation results in a molecule containing the maximum amount of hydrogen (in other words the conversion of an unsaturated fatty acid into a saturated one
Yup! But that is no longer trans fat
The questioner was asking about trans fat which is PARTIALLY hydrogenated oils. Fully hydrogenated oils are, as you described, saturated and do not contain the trans fats that we fear today ~Nicole
Not only does trans fats increase LDL cholesterol, it also lowers HDL (good cholesterol). It's a double whammy.
It has also been shown to increase fat stored in the abdominal area in pigs. Think about that when you're trying to get a flat tummy.
~Nicole
Yup! But that is no longer trans fat
~Nicole
it never fails, once a thread like this starts there is always going to be some sort of nerd off!! (now all you have to do is picture them in their labs coats going "you just got served")
Saturated fats increase LDL as well however they aid in stable testosterone levels in males. A healthy way to approach saturated fat intake would be to keep it at 30% of your total daily fat intake. The Mono and Poly's taken in during the rest of the day will help balance LDL/HDL.
What happens when you eat hydrogenated oils?
Just how bad is this ingredient for your health? Consider this list of detrimental health effects caused by hydrogenated oils, published in this report:
* Directly promotes heart disease
* Promotes cancers: breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer
* Results in low birth weight infants
* Raises LDL (bad) cholesterol and lower HDL (good) cholesterol
* Raises blood sugar levels and promotes weight gain
* Interferes with the absorption of essential fatty acids and DHA
* Impairs brain function and damages brain cells
* Accelerates tumor growth
* Accelerates the progress of type-2 diabetes
* Raises serum cholesterol
* Impairs immune system function
* Promotes attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
* Impairs development of the brains of fetuses
* Causes gallbladder disease
* Causes liver disease
* Causes 30,000 deaths per year in the United States alone
* Clogs blood, makes blood cells stick together
* Blocks the body's creation of natural pain-reducing hormones (eicosanoids)
* Causes the creation of free radicals that promote inflammation
* Creates nutritional deficiencies of healthy oils and essential fatty acids (EFAs)
* Promotes cystic fibrosis
* Lowers essential fatty acids in the breast milk of nursing mothers
* Clogs artery walls and promotes atherosclerosis
* Cause gum disease and rotted teeth
* Lowers tissue oxygen intake
* Causes infertility
* Directly damages blood vessels
* Causes high blood pressure
* Weaken cell walls and compromises cellular structure
---------------------------------------------------------
Quoted from the book Poison in the Food: Hydrogenated Oils
Author: Mike Adams
Just how bad is this ingredient for your health? Consider this list of detrimental health effects caused by hydrogenated oils, published in this report:
* Directly promotes heart disease
* Promotes cancers: breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer
* Results in low birth weight infants
* Raises LDL (bad) cholesterol and lower HDL (good) cholesterol
* Raises blood sugar levels and promotes weight gain
* Interferes with the absorption of essential fatty acids and DHA
* Impairs brain function and damages brain cells
* Accelerates tumor growth
* Accelerates the progress of type-2 diabetes
* Raises serum cholesterol
* Impairs immune system function
* Promotes attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
* Impairs development of the brains of fetuses
* Causes gallbladder disease
* Causes liver disease
* Causes 30,000 deaths per year in the United States alone
* Clogs blood, makes blood cells stick together
* Blocks the body's creation of natural pain-reducing hormones (eicosanoids)
* Causes the creation of free radicals that promote inflammation
* Creates nutritional deficiencies of healthy oils and essential fatty acids (EFAs)
* Promotes cystic fibrosis
* Lowers essential fatty acids in the breast milk of nursing mothers
* Clogs artery walls and promotes atherosclerosis
* Cause gum disease and rotted teeth
* Lowers tissue oxygen intake
* Causes infertility
* Directly damages blood vessels
* Causes high blood pressure
* Weaken cell walls and compromises cellular structure
---------------------------------------------------------
Quoted from the book Poison in the Food: Hydrogenated Oils
Author: Mike Adams
Can we say ow? Seriously, I think slammed to death is a good word... Great info, I love this nerdy ****, gives me new stuff to learn and understand.
Hold on. Hydrogenated Oils are Saturated Fat.
This is a Trans-Fat article I wrote for my office Wellness Program. I was trying to convince a bunch of cubical dwellers to forgo the donut, so it is fairly a simple article:
The Hype About Trans Fats: Believe It!
Ok, I’ll admit when I first heard the hub-bub about Trans fats: New York City making them illegal, the FDA requiring labels to list them, lawsuits against food companies that use them, and the campaign to ban them from society (, I thought that this was another attempt by lawyers to make money by claiming that their couch-sitting, fast food eating, non-exercising clients had no idea that eating fat made you, well, fat. However, the more I looked into trans fats, I became convinced that they were much more than innocent little preservatives added to Oreos.
Not all fats are bad. There are "good" fats and "bad" ones, just like there's good and bad blood cholesterol. Saturated fats and trans fat have bad effects on cholesterol levels by raising bad cholesterol. Polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats (such as olive oil, canola oil, soybean oil, and corn oil) have good effects by raising good cholesterol levels and lowering bad cholesterol levels.
Fat is necessary. Fat doesn't just keep us safe and warm (and buoyant). It's an endocrine factory, secreting substances that play a role in everything from regulating weight to constricting blood vessels. Fat produces leptin, which then travels to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls appetite. There it binds to receptors that send messages signaling that the body is full. Fats also transport fat soluble vitamins through the blood, and fats are necessary for cell structure and making hormones.
What are Trans Fats? Trans fats occur in manufactured foods during the process of partial hydrogenation, when hydrogen gas is bubbled through vegetable oil which are then hardened into margarine or shortening to increase shelf life and stabilize the original polyunsatured oil.
Trans fats are usually found in fried foods, fast food, vegetable shortenings, margarines, crackers, cookies, snack foods, and baked goods.
So why is that so Terrible? A trans-fat diet reduces blood vessel function by 30% and lowered HDL ("good")-cholesterol levels by about one fifth compared with plain old saturated-fat diet. So trans fats are much worse than saturated fats. Moreover, trans fats, like saturated fats, raise LDL ("bad")-cholesterol levels, which increase the risk of coronary heart disease.
According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, more than 12.5 million Americans have coronary heart disease, and more than 500,000 die each year. That makes coronary heart disease one of the leading causes of death in the United States.
Besides Being Unhealthy, Look at What Happened to the Monkeys!
In a 6 year study, male monkeys were fed a western-style diet with 35% of the calories coming from fats. One group of monkeys got 8% of their fat from trans fats, the other group received 8% of their fats as monounsaturated fats (like olive oil). They researchers did not believe that the monkeys would get obese because “we did not give them enough calories to get fat.”
Not only did the trans fat group of monkeys have a 7.2% increase in body weight (that’s over 7 pound for every 100 pounds they weighed) as compared to the 1.8% increase in the unsaturated fat group, but ALL that extra weight went to the abdomen! Not only that but some other body fat in these monkey migrated to the abdomen.
Trans fats = pot belly
It is worth mentioning that the apple body-shaped folks (with a waist to hip circumference in a women is .8 or higher, and in a man 1.0 or higher) are more prone to diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
The Good News.
The Food and Drug Administration has required that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol be listed on food labels since 1993. Starting Jan.1, 2006, listing of trans fat is required as well. This means that you can avoid trans fats. Also, after this FDA requirement many food companies stop or limited their use of trans fats.
However, if a food item has .5 grams of trans fats or less, they can round that amount down to 0. But you can know if a food contains trans fat by looking at the ingredient list on the food label. If the ingredient list includes the words "shortening," "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" or "hydrogenated vegetable oil," the food contains trans fat. Because ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance, smaller amounts are present when the ingredient is close to the end of the list.
The American Heart Association recommends that your daily intake of trans fats not exceed 1% of the total calories you consume, but there is no FDA Daily Allowance for trans fats. It is worth noting that trans fats occur naturally in meat, milk and other dairy produce but at low levels and naturally occurring trans fats are limited and balanced by the good properties of these foods. The lower you keep the percent of man-made trans fats, the better.
The Hype About Trans Fats: Believe It!
Ok, I’ll admit when I first heard the hub-bub about Trans fats: New York City making them illegal, the FDA requiring labels to list them, lawsuits against food companies that use them, and the campaign to ban them from society (, I thought that this was another attempt by lawyers to make money by claiming that their couch-sitting, fast food eating, non-exercising clients had no idea that eating fat made you, well, fat. However, the more I looked into trans fats, I became convinced that they were much more than innocent little preservatives added to Oreos.
Not all fats are bad. There are "good" fats and "bad" ones, just like there's good and bad blood cholesterol. Saturated fats and trans fat have bad effects on cholesterol levels by raising bad cholesterol. Polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats (such as olive oil, canola oil, soybean oil, and corn oil) have good effects by raising good cholesterol levels and lowering bad cholesterol levels.
Fat is necessary. Fat doesn't just keep us safe and warm (and buoyant). It's an endocrine factory, secreting substances that play a role in everything from regulating weight to constricting blood vessels. Fat produces leptin, which then travels to the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls appetite. There it binds to receptors that send messages signaling that the body is full. Fats also transport fat soluble vitamins through the blood, and fats are necessary for cell structure and making hormones.
What are Trans Fats? Trans fats occur in manufactured foods during the process of partial hydrogenation, when hydrogen gas is bubbled through vegetable oil which are then hardened into margarine or shortening to increase shelf life and stabilize the original polyunsatured oil.
Trans fats are usually found in fried foods, fast food, vegetable shortenings, margarines, crackers, cookies, snack foods, and baked goods.
So why is that so Terrible? A trans-fat diet reduces blood vessel function by 30% and lowered HDL ("good")-cholesterol levels by about one fifth compared with plain old saturated-fat diet. So trans fats are much worse than saturated fats. Moreover, trans fats, like saturated fats, raise LDL ("bad")-cholesterol levels, which increase the risk of coronary heart disease.
According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, more than 12.5 million Americans have coronary heart disease, and more than 500,000 die each year. That makes coronary heart disease one of the leading causes of death in the United States.
Besides Being Unhealthy, Look at What Happened to the Monkeys!
In a 6 year study, male monkeys were fed a western-style diet with 35% of the calories coming from fats. One group of monkeys got 8% of their fat from trans fats, the other group received 8% of their fats as monounsaturated fats (like olive oil). They researchers did not believe that the monkeys would get obese because “we did not give them enough calories to get fat.”
Not only did the trans fat group of monkeys have a 7.2% increase in body weight (that’s over 7 pound for every 100 pounds they weighed) as compared to the 1.8% increase in the unsaturated fat group, but ALL that extra weight went to the abdomen! Not only that but some other body fat in these monkey migrated to the abdomen.
Trans fats = pot belly
It is worth mentioning that the apple body-shaped folks (with a waist to hip circumference in a women is .8 or higher, and in a man 1.0 or higher) are more prone to diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
The Good News.
The Food and Drug Administration has required that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol be listed on food labels since 1993. Starting Jan.1, 2006, listing of trans fat is required as well. This means that you can avoid trans fats. Also, after this FDA requirement many food companies stop or limited their use of trans fats.
However, if a food item has .5 grams of trans fats or less, they can round that amount down to 0. But you can know if a food contains trans fat by looking at the ingredient list on the food label. If the ingredient list includes the words "shortening," "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" or "hydrogenated vegetable oil," the food contains trans fat. Because ingredients are listed in descending order of predominance, smaller amounts are present when the ingredient is close to the end of the list.
The American Heart Association recommends that your daily intake of trans fats not exceed 1% of the total calories you consume, but there is no FDA Daily Allowance for trans fats. It is worth noting that trans fats occur naturally in meat, milk and other dairy produce but at low levels and naturally occurring trans fats are limited and balanced by the good properties of these foods. The lower you keep the percent of man-made trans fats, the better.