Trans fats are unhealthy.
Their production involves high pressure, heat, and hydrogen gas in the presence of a metal catalyst.
This process makes liquid vegetable oils solid at room temperature.
Of course, trans fats are more than just unappetizing. Studies show that they are unhealthy and linked to a drastic increase in heart disease risk (1, 2).
Luckily, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has banned trans fats as of June 18, 2018, though products manufactured before this date can still be distributed until 2020 and in some cases 2021 (3).
Plus, foods with less than 0.5 grams of trans fats per serving may be labeled as having 0 grams (4).
The mainstream media is one of the reasons behind many circulating nutrition myths and confusions.
It’s entirely false that meat rots in your colon.
What people generally refer to as “cholesterol” isn’t really cholesterol.
Most people focus too much on weight gain or loss. The truth is that health goes way beyond that.
Many obese people are metabolically healthy, while many normal-weight people have the same metabolic problems associated with obesity (22, 23).
Focusing just on body weight is counterproductive. It’s possible to improve health without losing weight — and vice versa.
It appears that the area where fat builds up is important. The fat in your abdominal cavity (belly fat) is associated with metabolic problems, while the fat under your skin is mostly a cosmetic problem (24).
Therefore, reducing belly fat should be a priority for health improvement. The fat under your skin or the number on the scale doesn’t matter as much.
However, this doesn’t mean you need to monitor everything that enters your body and track or count calories.
For example, eating more protein has been shown to lead to automatic calorie restriction and significant weight loss — without deliberately restricting calories (25, 26).
For decades, people have been advised to eat a low-fat diet with carbs making up 50–60% of calories.
Surprisingly, this advice was extended to include people with type 2 diabetes — who cannot tolerate a lot of easily digestible carbs, like sugar and refined starch.
People with type 2 diabetes are resistant to insulin and any carbs they eat will cause a big rise in blood sugar levels.
For this reason, they need to take blood-sugar-lowering drugs to bring their levels down.
If anyone benefits from a low-carb diet, it is people with diabetes. In one study, following a low-carb diet for only 6 months allowed 95.2% of participants to reduce or eliminate their blood sugar medication (27).
This content was originally published here.
