Many hear about saturated and trans fats and that we should avoid them for good health, but there is little public information about what they really are. While it’s easy to see how you affect the body as you accumulate fat around our vital organs, you need to dig deeper to understand where it comes from and why it’s so bad. How much we have in our diet and how to avoid them is a vital part of staying fit and healthy.

Saturated fats are the easiest to understand since they come from animal material. That gorgeous grilled chop with its delicious garnish of fat is exactly what we’re talking about. Many cannot resist the great taste of such a gift. Animal fats are also found in milk and butter and consumption of these adds to the bill.

Cooking meat in such a way that fats are removed and consumers think they are removed is not necessarily the case. Fat accumulates under the skin and within the meat and simply cutting it does not completely remove it. Marbled meat shows this condition.

Foods that contain butter are also high in animal fat and include cookies, cakes, scones, and pastries. Processing these changes changes their nature to trans fats, which are a product of the cooking and baking process.

That raises the question of whether your favorite roast is also harmful. Well, it just so happens to be. Through the same process of using excessive heat to cook food, trans fats emerge from the saturated animal fat that is often used to baste meat prepared that way.

Why are these fats harmful? Normal fat is treated by special enzymes and other things within our digestive tract that prepare it for transport to where it needs to go. This will involve the liver and pancreas.

When fats are turned into trans fats, more hydrogen atoms are added and the digestive process breaks down. Floating freely in the blood, they settle around organs, including blood vessels, and are responsible for hardening of the arteries and blockages that lead to heart attacks, strokes, and more. The accumulation of such around the liver and pancreas can cause cancer of these organs.

The digestive process of fats is online and it is worth taking a look to be able to make better food choices. https://www.livescience.com/57116-trans-fats-facts.html