Healthful Eating: Avoiding Trans Fats

What the Girls Scout Cookies, Starbucks, and the Big Apple have in common? The answer is: they are all eliminating trans fats from their products. Apparently this artificial ingredient, also known as partially hydrogenated oil and hydrogenated oil, is contained in all processed foods that include in their ingredients partially hydrogenated oils or shortening, such as margarines, frying fats, crackers, baked goods, chips, cookies, and many more. Trans fats are also considered by many doctors the worst kind of fats because it may be a contributing factor to several negative health effects, one of the reasons why many food producers are going trans free. To maintain a healthful diet, consumers need to know where these fats came from, how they affect the human body and how to avoid them.

Trans fats are vegetable oils, artificially and chemically modified by a process called hydrogenation, which consists in bubbling hydrogen gas through the vegetable oil, changing the chemical