7 Things That’ll Happen Once You Finally Stop Eating Trans Fats
The FDA announced Tuesday that it's banning trans fats — but what exactly does that mean for your personal health? A lot. (Photo: Getty Images)
A big change is about to hit grocery store shelves. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration moved Tuesday to force food makers to remove trans fats from the products they produce over the next three years.
“Based on a thorough review of the scientific evidence, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration today finalized its determination that partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), the primary dietary source of artificial trans fat in processed foods, are not ‘generally recognized as safe’ (GRAS) for use in food,” the organization said in a statement.
Trans fats — also known as trans fatty acids — are made when hydrogen is added to unsaturated oils, according to Eric Calloway, PhD, registered dietician and postdoctoral fellow with the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition in Omaha, Neb. This process creates a solid that inexpensively adds texture to and improves the shelf life of foods, making it popular with manufacturers when formulating foods such as snack crackers, frozen pizza, pastries and breaded chicken strips.
But what’s good for food production costs can prove deadly for the people who eat the final products. Champions of eliminating artificial trans fat from foods say life will be infinitely better without the ingredient, but how exactly will you (and your food) benefit from the ban?
1. Your Risk for a Heart Attack Will be Slashed
The biggest problem with trans fats is that they raise levels of low-density lipoproteins, the bad type of cholesterol that can build up and narrow the arteries. Constricted arteries leads to higher blood pressure, which in turn can lead to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks, according to Calloway.
Replacing those fatty acids with more heart-health alternatives can keep trans fat-related cholesterol spikes, which in turn lowers risk for heart disease. This translates into a large decrease in the number of people who are hospitalized — or die from — heart disease.
A “reduction in the amount of trans fat in the American diet could prevent an additional 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths from heart disease each year — a critical step in the protection of Americans’ health,“ FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, MD, said during a 2013 push to ban trans fats.
2. You Might Have a Better Memory
A 2012 study by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University looked at the diets and health habits of 104 people with an average age of 87 and found that those who ate a diet full of trans fats scored lower on memory and thinking tests that those who didn’t. The people who ate foods high in trans fat also experienced more brain shrinkage.
Those findings piggyback on a 2008 study that studied the effects of trans fat on the brains of rats. The rats given a high trans fat diet experienced inflammation around the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning.
3. You Could Be Happier
The connection between diet and mood disorders isn’t completely understood, but at least one study has connected a diet high in trans fat and depression.
In 2011, Spanish researchers studied 12,059 people over six years and found that those who consumed the most trans fats had a 48 percent higher risk of depression than those who didn’t. On the flip side, the people who kept a diet high in polyunsaturated fats, like those found in olive oil, reported fewer instances of depression.
4. You’ll Probably Consume Other Fats in Place of Trans Fats
Removing trans fats from food isn’t as simple as just leaving it out of the ingredients list. Trans fats — like other types of fats — are used to give foods ranging from coffee creamer to crackers texture and taste, so simply removing them wouldn’t exactly be appetizing.
Related: 5 Hidden Facts the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know
"Companies will have to get find new ways to use ingredients,” Calloway tells Yahoo Health. “Most likely they’ll use a blend of oils and unsaturated fats, things like palm oil and soybean oil, that will, with a little experimenting, give the same sort of mouth feel as trans fats.”
It’s do that, or face taking the products off the shelves.
5. You’ll Know for Sure if You’re Actually Eating Trans Fats
The World Health Organization recommends that people who consume about 2,000 calories each day only take in two grams of trans fat. So, just avoiding products that have them listed on nutrition labels means you’re safe, right? Not necessarily. According to current FDA nutrition labeling guidelines, companies are allowed to report that foods contain 0 grams of trans fats even if it contains 0.5 grams per serving.
What’s worse: A study from Environmental Working Group found that 87 percent of over 7,500 foods they studied contained partially hydrogenated oils (trans fats) without disclosing it on the labels. Eight products studied that listed no trans fat actually had five grams or more per serving when studied by EWG.
It’s not clear if nutrition labeling regulations will change, though the language of the trans fat ban makes it clear that no artificial trans fats will be allowed in foods after 2018.
6. You’ll Still Eat Some Trans Fats — But They’ll Probably Be Natural vs. Synthetic
That said, some foods you shop for on a regular basis will still contain trans fats. Though it’s generally a manmade product, trans fatty acids occur naturally in some foods like beef, dairy, pork and lamb, according to Calloway. It won’t be easy to remove these fats from whole foods, so the ban won’t apply there.
Related: 9 New Fat Facts That’ll Boost Your Weight Loss Efforts
The Grocery Manufacturers Association — an organization that represents the interests of food companies like Kellogg Co. and General Mills Inc. — plans to petition the FDA to allow trans fats if they can “show that the presence of trans fat from the proposed low-level uses of partially hydrogenated oils is as safe as the naturally occurring trans fat present in the normal diet.”
7. And, the Best Part: You Probably Won’t Even Notice Anything’s Different
Worried that your favorite food — frozen pizzas, biscuits, donuts and the like — will never taste the same after the ban goes into effect?
Don’t be: Some manufacturers and restaurants have already eliminated trans fats in foods over the years without consumers knowing the difference. A 2012 study on New York City’s restaurant trans fat ban found that the transition was "seamless” and “most New Yorkers didn’t even notice,” Christine Curtis, a coauthor of the study and director of the city’s Nutrition Strategy Program, told CNN.
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