Eulalee Thompson

Randomly pick any delectable dessert - ice cream sundae with chocolate or caramel topping and whipped cream with nuts and cherries or double chocolate brownie dipped in hot fudge - delicious, but nutrition scientists say that they are loaded with all the bad, cholesterol-loaded, artery-clogging fats.

There are 'good' fats, 'bad' fats and then the 'king' of the 'bad' fats - trans fatty acids (or just trans fats). So bad are trans fats that health authorities in many countries now require food companies to separately list trans fat content on the nutrition facts panel on food labels. Some nutritionists say that there is no safe amount of trans fats in the diet. That means trans fats intake should be zero grams.

Trans fats are a type of unsaturated fat that occur naturally, but in small quantities, in meat and dairy product. These naturally occurring trans fats aren't the ones causing the stir in nutrition science, it's the industrially-created trans fats , the fat heavily used in the fast food, snack food, fried food and baked goods industries, which they say are linked to a myriad of chronic lifestyle diseases.

Shortenings and margarines

But 'healthy' serving of trans fat could be sitting right there in your refrigerator at home if you use vegetable shortenings and some brands of margarine.

Equate industrially-created trans fats to the words ' partially hydrogenated fats'. It's unlikely that food labels here in Jamaica, where there is limited labelling requirement, will list 'trans fats' but under the food content panel, they will list 'partially hydrogenated fat'.

The processed food industry create trans fats in a chemical process by partially hydrogenating (exposing to hydrogen gas) unsaturated plant oils (vegetable oils) and animal fats. Trans fats, not liquid oils, is more convenient in food preparation in the processed food industry; convenience in the sense of increase product shelf life, decreased refrigeration requirement and it is fat, so it adds great flavour to the products.

KFC seeks new oil

Fortunately, emerging news of the health hazard attached to trans fats is not lost on the international fast food industry. KFC Jamaica announced last week that in keeping with decisions taken by KFC Corporation, it has been "exploring the reduction or elimination of trans fats from the oil we use".

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