Margarine is the result of chemical changes.It is a mixture of hydrogenated vegetable oil and skimmed milk .In hydrogenation,hydrogen is passed through the vegetable oil.
Most margarines, factory biscuits and commercial pies are more of a threat to your health than butter and other animal fats.
By the YOU Pulse team
If you have just a half to one teaspoon more trans fats than usual it will increase your risk of a heart attack by 50 per cent
AFTER years of baking, cooking and greasing with "safe" margarine, we're now told most margarines in South African shops may present more of a risk to our health than butter and other animal fats.
Trans fats are found in most kinds of margarine and are just as dangerous or even more dangerous than saturated fats, which were for many years regarded as the major cause of heart attacks.
Alarming new research has found that eating just a little too much trans fat can dramatically increase your chances of having a heart attack or getting diabetes and even cancer.
"Most people are completely unaware of the dangers lurking in hard margarine and commercial pastries. Unlike other countries South Africa has no legislation that protects consumers against this danger," says Dr Carl Albrecht, an independent medical research consultant, pharmacologist and biochemist.
Researchers at Harvard University in America have proved that having just half to one teaspoon more trans fat than usual (one teaspoon instead of half a teaspoon a day) will increase your risk of having a heart attack by 50 per cent.
Their study was done on a group of 33 000 women over six years as part of the extensive Nurses' Health Study. The worrying part is that people who follow a typical Western diet eat almost twice as much trans fat a day as the women in the study and therefore run an even greater risk of having a heart attack. "This is a dangerous situation yet no one from our Department of Health is breathing a word about it.
27%- The percentage of trans fats in hard margarine, which is often the cheapest and is used by a large part of the population.
Government has been dragging its feet on legislation aimed at regulating the trans fat content of food since 2003 – and South Africans are being put at risk," Albrecht says.
Professor Spinnie Benadé, former director of the National Nutritional Research Institute of South Africa and an expert on oils and fats, is also concerned about the absence of legislation regulating trans fat content in South Africa. "There are guidelines but no regulations oblige producers to make changes for the sake of public health." Trans fats are manmade fats found not only in margarines but in nearly 40 per cent of all food.
Hard margarine, which is used in bakery- or factorymanufactured pastries and often also in baked goods from home industries, turn commercial cookies, rusks, crackers, pies, croissants, doughnuts, Danish pastries and some home-industry cakes into a serious health risk. A good general guideline: the harder the margarine, the more trans fats it contains. Some margarines may contain up to 15 per cent trans fats, compared with three per cent in butter.