The Latest Food Industry Health Risk – Interesterified Fats
You may not have heard of interestified fats, which are the food industries latest attempt to save money at the expense of your health. They are the replacement for trans-fats because of the bad name the trans-fats now have. They are of particular concern if you are diabetic or pre-diabetic.
Interesterified Fats
You may know that trans-fats are made by partially hydrogenating vegetable oils. The process adds hydrogen to the fats making their melting point higher. The health risks have been publicized so much that most manufacturers have been forced into stopping using them.
Of course, as with trans-fats research has gone into the suitability of these fats for use in products to replace trans-fats which in turn replaced solid fats because they were too expensive but any research on the health risks has been underfunded and where it was negative has been ignored.
Make no mistake the food industry failed to learn any lessons from the trans-fats scandal and are completely ignoring the health threat to generations arising from their latest folly.
The Interesterification process takes natural fats which are liquid at room temperature and mixes them with a smaller quantity of natural fats which are solid at room temperate adds certain enzymes or catalysts which cause the fats to randomly exchange the Ester part of the fat (this gives the fat its fatty characteristics). This produces a quantity of non-naturally occurring solid fats which the body has not encountered before and cannot deal properly with them.
The scariest thing about them, coming from the little independent research which has been done, is that they suppress insulin levels and raise blood glucose levels – a double whammy. This means they could be a factor in the development of Diabetes or worsen an existing condition. Like Trans-fats they are going to be something the diabetic must strenuously avoid to have a remote chance of controlling blood sugar levels.
These Interesterified fats are now becoming widespread as a replacement for the trans-fats and packages often mention that they have been made with ‘No trans-fats’. They conveniently forget to mention there is something potentially equally as bad or even worse. They will not go back to natural solid fats because of the cost and the cost to your health is not even considered.
How do you to recognize these fats in food products? It is difficult because there is currently no compulsion on manufacturers to identify Interesterified fats as there are for Trans-fats. Often, they are described as ‘fully hydrogentated fats’ or Palm oil or vegetable oil sometimes with the word ‘modified’. Anything with pastry and only vegetable oil as the fat will have been made with IFs. You need to be vigilant to spot them but your health will benefit.
In the end Interesterified fats are just another cheap way to get products in the shops with the health consequences being ignored because they get in the way of profits. Any time you take a fat and chemically modify it you are asking for trouble because the human body needs generations to adapt to unfamiliar food ingredients.
Tags: blood sugar levels, insulin levels, interesterified fats, trans fats
