ez egy nagyon tanulsagos cikk,
sajnos csak Angolul
Good Food Goes Bad
by Alicia Priest
Last November, Canadian parliamentarians vindicated my grandmas eating habits. At least part way. Like every good Mennonite of her generation, she spurned store-bought breads, cookies, cakes, and pastries and insisted on making her own zwieback, pfeffernusse, tortes, and other delicacies laden with butter, eggs, cream, and milk. Margarine never touched her lips. Neither did soup-in-a-cup, chicken-in-a-bucket, fish-in-a-breadstick or that culinary oxymoron, non-dairy coffee creamer.
Grandma didnt know it, but nearly all commercially prepared foods contain a man-made poison called trans fatty acids. (Meats and milk contain trace amounts of trans fats, but the vast majority we consume are produced by an industrial process.) When MPs ruled last fall that food manufacturers must list trans-fat content on labels by 2006, they gave the nod to what some food scientists have been arguing for years: Trans fats kill. They do so by stiffening and clogging arteries, thereby raising the risk of heart disease. NDP leader Jack Layton has urged politicians to go even further and ban processed trans fats entirely, a move recommended by the World Health Organization but made by only one country to dateDenmark.
The popularity of trans fats in our diet attests to our fondness for cheap foods conveniently made by someone else. Soon after World War II, food manufacturers looked to replace butter with a cheap fat that wouldnt go rancid after a relatively short period of time. They discovered hydrogenation, a pro-cess that bubbles hydrogen gas through liquid vegetable oil, usually canola or soybean, under high pressure at high temperatures in the presence of a heavy metal such as cadmium. The metal acts as a catalyst. The result is an artificial substance that Vancouver registered dietician Karen Mornin describes as toxic to our bodies. Trans fats increase shelf life but decrease human life. Mornin explains, Trans fats are a double wham-mythey raise LDL, the bad cholesterol, and lower HDL, the good cholesterol.
In less than 50 years, trans fats have swept throughout the food supply and now nestle in almost every edible product produced outside the home, from puddings to peanut butter to Pop Tarts. Today, Canadians consume an average of 10 grams of trans fat a day. Thats the equivalent of ingesting a medium order of french fries plus a gourmet cinnamon bun every 24 hours.
Right now the words trans fats dont appear on nutrition labels. Instead theyre hidden behind euphemisms such as hydrogenation, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, or vegetable oil shortening. While mandatory labeling will help consumers and manufacturers avoid these harmful fats, Mornin acknowledges that theres more to it. Perhaps the hardest thing to do is switch from foods that can sit in a cupboard for two years without aging to foods that do what biodegradable matter shoulddegrade.
You want to eat foods that basically rot, Mornin says. Because if theyre not going to break down in the environment, theyre not going to break down in your body.
(Anyone looking for a remarkable reminder of this should watch the special feature on the DVD version of the documentary Super Size Me , in which a sample of McDonalds french fries simply refuses to die.)
Mornin worries that trans fats will be replaced by tropical oils and other saturated fats that she says are equally harmful because they, too, raise bad cholesterol. Given that obesity is the nations number-one health challenge, she urges everyone to aim for a low-fat diet.
But therein lies an intriguing controversy. Nutrition, like all sciences, is a slowly evolving discipline. Remember when eggs were considered dietary villains? So were avocados and chocolate. Now, theyve been redeemed by the discovery that they contain nutrients, including fats, that do more good than harm.
Contrary to decades of advice to eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, scientists now say it is the quality of fat that matters, not the quantity. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, trans fats are far worse than saturated fats when it comes to heart disease. And when it comes to obesity, scientists point out that over the past decade Americans have actually reduced the number of calories they get from fat while simultaneously becoming fatter. Thats because the total number of calories they consume in relation to what they burn has gone up.
Indeed, there is no good evidence for an optimal amount of total fat in a healthy diet. Two large Harvard studies over the past 20 years found no link between the overall percentage of calories from fat and any important health outcome, including cancer, heart disease, and weight gain.
Like my grandma said, eat everything in moderation. Everything, that is, except trans fats.
http://www.dragonflymedia.com/sv/2005/sv1802/index.html
sajnos csak Angolul
Good Food Goes Bad
by Alicia Priest
Last November, Canadian parliamentarians vindicated my grandmas eating habits. At least part way. Like every good Mennonite of her generation, she spurned store-bought breads, cookies, cakes, and pastries and insisted on making her own zwieback, pfeffernusse, tortes, and other delicacies laden with butter, eggs, cream, and milk. Margarine never touched her lips. Neither did soup-in-a-cup, chicken-in-a-bucket, fish-in-a-breadstick or that culinary oxymoron, non-dairy coffee creamer.
Grandma didnt know it, but nearly all commercially prepared foods contain a man-made poison called trans fatty acids. (Meats and milk contain trace amounts of trans fats, but the vast majority we consume are produced by an industrial process.) When MPs ruled last fall that food manufacturers must list trans-fat content on labels by 2006, they gave the nod to what some food scientists have been arguing for years: Trans fats kill. They do so by stiffening and clogging arteries, thereby raising the risk of heart disease. NDP leader Jack Layton has urged politicians to go even further and ban processed trans fats entirely, a move recommended by the World Health Organization but made by only one country to dateDenmark.
The popularity of trans fats in our diet attests to our fondness for cheap foods conveniently made by someone else. Soon after World War II, food manufacturers looked to replace butter with a cheap fat that wouldnt go rancid after a relatively short period of time. They discovered hydrogenation, a pro-cess that bubbles hydrogen gas through liquid vegetable oil, usually canola or soybean, under high pressure at high temperatures in the presence of a heavy metal such as cadmium. The metal acts as a catalyst. The result is an artificial substance that Vancouver registered dietician Karen Mornin describes as toxic to our bodies. Trans fats increase shelf life but decrease human life. Mornin explains, Trans fats are a double wham-mythey raise LDL, the bad cholesterol, and lower HDL, the good cholesterol.
In less than 50 years, trans fats have swept throughout the food supply and now nestle in almost every edible product produced outside the home, from puddings to peanut butter to Pop Tarts. Today, Canadians consume an average of 10 grams of trans fat a day. Thats the equivalent of ingesting a medium order of french fries plus a gourmet cinnamon bun every 24 hours.
Right now the words trans fats dont appear on nutrition labels. Instead theyre hidden behind euphemisms such as hydrogenation, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, or vegetable oil shortening. While mandatory labeling will help consumers and manufacturers avoid these harmful fats, Mornin acknowledges that theres more to it. Perhaps the hardest thing to do is switch from foods that can sit in a cupboard for two years without aging to foods that do what biodegradable matter shoulddegrade.
You want to eat foods that basically rot, Mornin says. Because if theyre not going to break down in the environment, theyre not going to break down in your body.
(Anyone looking for a remarkable reminder of this should watch the special feature on the DVD version of the documentary Super Size Me , in which a sample of McDonalds french fries simply refuses to die.)
Mornin worries that trans fats will be replaced by tropical oils and other saturated fats that she says are equally harmful because they, too, raise bad cholesterol. Given that obesity is the nations number-one health challenge, she urges everyone to aim for a low-fat diet.
But therein lies an intriguing controversy. Nutrition, like all sciences, is a slowly evolving discipline. Remember when eggs were considered dietary villains? So were avocados and chocolate. Now, theyve been redeemed by the discovery that they contain nutrients, including fats, that do more good than harm.
Contrary to decades of advice to eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, scientists now say it is the quality of fat that matters, not the quantity. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, trans fats are far worse than saturated fats when it comes to heart disease. And when it comes to obesity, scientists point out that over the past decade Americans have actually reduced the number of calories they get from fat while simultaneously becoming fatter. Thats because the total number of calories they consume in relation to what they burn has gone up.
Indeed, there is no good evidence for an optimal amount of total fat in a healthy diet. Two large Harvard studies over the past 20 years found no link between the overall percentage of calories from fat and any important health outcome, including cancer, heart disease, and weight gain.
Like my grandma said, eat everything in moderation. Everything, that is, except trans fats.
http://www.dragonflymedia.com/sv/2005/sv1802/index.html
