Have you heard about Trans Fat?

There is a lot of talking around this new term in our diets, is it that bad?, you must have seen fast food dinners with signs of "trans fat free" promoting this new term, but what does it mean? and how does it affect our body.

First of all we need to understand something, overweight is a current and alarming issue in the world, health problems that are carried along overweight come in a big list with "heart diseases" among the main ones.
The primary risk in the heart diseases category is the elevated risk of Coronary heart disease or CHD, im not a doctor but i've read a lot of medicine books, and CHD means that the arteries around the heart get blocked by an acumulation of lipids (cholesterol being one of them).

 But our society gets bombed by the media, and in that process the term "Cholesterol" has been missunderstood, Our body NEEDS cholesterol, it is very important for our cells and its envolved in the producing of some vitamins and hormones in the body, but why-you may ask me- am i saying it is good? when it blocks our arteries?. There,s a simple answer for that, that cholesterol couldnt get to the arteries by itself, it was carried by something else. And THATS the bad guy in all this issue, but its not its fault that it exists, its our own.

There are 2 carriers involved in this process, they are called Lipoproteins, they both are important and essential and have its own mission in our body. They are the LDL (low density lipoprotein) and HDL (high density lipoprotein).
LDL has the mission to carry lipids from the liver to the cells (like i said cells need cholesterol and its one of the lipids)
HDL has the mission to gather lipids from the cells and tissues and carry it back to the liver.
So clearly they both need to be synchonized so there isnt too much lipid acumulation in the cells or a lack of it.

But what happens when we promote the acumulation of one of them? we take down the balance that our body has.
This is where "TRANS FAT" comes into play, a high amount of Trans fat in our diets, increase the concentracion of LDL in our body and decrease the concentracion of HDL. So in other words, we are telling our body to accumulate fat in our cells with our diet!!!!.

But how to stay away from "trans fat"??, here is another topic that most media wont discuss, there's 2 kinds of TRANS FAT, the natural one, that is in animal (pork fat) and vegetable fat (olive oil, corn oil), its not in high amounts but it is there.
And the other kind, the synthetic one, this is the dangerous one!, it is present mostly in MARGARINE, the margarine is a vegetable oil that has been Hydrogenated in the lab, believe me, i've done this hydrogenation myself and contains a high amount of trans fat!. Be aware!! some butters are made in the lab aswell!
Margarine is used in baking market that being bread, cakes and else.

Most organic vegetable oils that are used in the frying of foods have natural trans fat, but its not necessary to removed them how they do. My thoughts on this, is that synthetic trans fat obtained in the hydrogenation is harder and more expensive than removing it from natural oils, but the world doesnt care about health as much as they should so society has to make changes to fit our desires.

Diets that give you "DONT EAT" advices are really bad, as you can see the way to get healthy is not just eat healthy food, is to find a BALANCE between fat food and non fat food. Every meal is healthy....in the right amount.