TRANS FAT UPDATE
As you design your diet, remember that it’s particularly important to reduce the amount of trans fat in your diet.
During the past decade, there has been increasing emphasis on the dangers posed by these hardened fats, which occur when polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oil are combined with hydrogen atoms through the process of hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated, trans fats can be found in relative abundance in such foods as stick margarine and commercial crackers and cookies.
A past years report revealed some startling new facts about the threat of trans fats. In evaluating more than 80,000 womens, 34 to 59 years of age, the researchers found that trans fats posed even more of a cardiovascular risk than saturated fats.
Specifically, the investigators concluded that if an individual cut her intake of trans fats by only 2 percent, she would reduce her risk of coronary disease by 53 percent! In contrast, lowering the consumption of saturated fat by 5 percent would reduce the risk or coronary disease by 42 percent. In other words, cutting trans fat had more impact on coronary disease than cutting saturated fats.
So it’s essential, in in designing your own cholesterol lowering diet, that you reduce your intake of trans fats, as well as your consumption of saturated fats.