Trans Fats – WTF?

So while we’ve been away, the world’s discovered a new supervillain: Dr Trans Fatty Acids, scheming away in his evil mountain hideaway, invisible to normal food labelling and a man-made scourge of society.

If you’re not hip to the jive, trans fats are created when food companies hydrogenate their vegetable oil (which they often do to make margarine-like products for use in processed food). Hydrogenating is a cheap fix, cheaper than lovely real butter – but it creates a whole new type of Terminator-like fat which has no place in the human body.

It’s apparently responsible for everything from coronaries to fertility problems in women – and the worst news is that it’s in pretty much all the cheap, nice food you like, such as pastries and cakes and cheap, cheap biscuits.

Boo, trans fats, boo! Watch out for the main offenders – and the media cobblers associated with a food scare – in the near future.