During fitness workouts with Zach, he like to keep you mind off the difficult parts of the routine by telling me about nutrition.  Today we talked about trans fat.

For those not in the know, trans fat is made by partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.  This is done by adding hydrogen to liquid vegetable oil at very high temperatures so that the oil changes into a semi soild fat.  Trans fats was introduced into processsed foods in the 1970′s  to help perserve them longer.

The problem with trans fat is that your body doesn’t need it and doesn’t know what to do with it so it stores it creating that fat that is very difficult to get rid of, as well as being harmful to your health.  It is also harmful to your cholesterol level, and is is a cause for heart disease.

So the goals here is to minimize the amounts of trans fats from our diet.  The food and drug admnistration has done an ok job of removing them from a lot of our foods, but the bad news is that you may still find trans fat in:

• deep fried foods, spring rolls, chicken nuggets and frozen potato products
• margarines and shortenings
• commercially baked goods like donuts, danishes, cakes, pies
• toaster pastries, waffels, pop tarts
• oriental noodles
• snack puddings
• microwave popcorn, chips, cheesies, crackers, cookies, and here’s one – granola bars

What do to:

Realistically, it’s very difficult to completely eliminate trans fat from your diet, but you can try to eat as little trans fat as possible.

Some general guidelines to help you reduce trans fats:

• Read food labels and avoid the words “partially hydrogenated” or “vegetable oil shortening” on the ingredient list.  These are tricky ways to say  trans fat.
• Load up on vegetables, fruit, and unprocessed whole grains. These are good for you, fill you up and are trans fat free.
• Avoid deep fried foods
• Cook from scratch as often as you can.   You will see what goes into your meals and avoid anything bad.
• Bake your own cakes muffins, and pancakes instead of relying on prepackaged mixes.   It’s cheap and easy.
• Avoid hard (stick) margarine, butter or partially hydrogenated shortening.

The good news is many food manufacturers have now reformulated their cookies, crackers and french fries to contain no trans fat, but again read  the label to ensure that the trans fat has not been replaced with saturated fat.