Last week I was asked to become a contributing writer on the award-winning food blog “The Jew and the Carrot ” a project of the Jewish environmental organization, Hazon.  I chose to write my first essay about trans fats and non-dairy creamer and margarine.  Even though these products were invented only 100 years ago, they play a major role in what is now considered “traditional” Jewish cooking.  In fact, most people who use them never even consider that our foremothers could not possibly have used them in “the old country,” wherever that may have been.  So what happened?  Two things happened — trans fats and marketing. 

Trans fats are produced by a chemical process called hydrogenation, which means the addition of hydrogen atoms.  Adding hydrogen atoms to liquid fats (oils) thickens them.  Thicken them enough, and they become solid, after which they can be used like other solid fats traditionally used for baking.  Traditional fats, depending on where you grew up, were usually butter, or lard, or coconut oil. 

So the young food science industry had developed a product that acted like fat.  It actually seemed better than butter and lard.  It was much cheaper.  It could be made in enormous quantities, and more simply.  It could be shipped long distances without refrigeration, and its shelf-life was counted in years instead of weeks.  The first cans of Crisco® came off the factory lines in 1911.  Margarine and coffee whiteners came in the years and decades that followed. 

Now the marketing and advertising departments got busy.  Procter & Gamble, the maker of Crisco®, launched a nationwide campaign, actively enlisting the support of various community leaders to endorse their products.  Mazola worked with local women’s groups to organize picnics to teach interested parties how to use their product, and made contributions to those groups for every unit sold.  Other examples abound. 

America became the target of a focused, sustained, and wildly successful marketing campaign.  It took just a couple of generations to unlearn how our great-ancestors had cooked for a thousand years.  It was not long before these inexpensive fats became industry standard in the manufacture of baked goods, breakfast cereals, and the like.  The rates of heart disease began to soar.

Why?  When we eat trans fats, they become incorporated into our organs.  Then those organs become stiff and inflexible.  Blood vessels harden and thicken.  Oxygen-carrying red blood cells can no longer pass through.  When arteries that supply the heart become blocked, the heart becomes starved for oxygen, and its unfortunate possessor develops chest pain.  Blockage of arteries to the brain causes strokes.  And the medical term for blockages in the legs is “peripheral vascular disease.”  We do “bypass” operations to describe both heart and leg surgeries that replace closed blood vessels with open ones.  Trans fats also interfere with all the fat-requiring metabolic processes, such as those involving fat storage, cholesterol synthesis, and reproductive hormones. 

What does the phrase “trans fats” mean?  To understand, we need to consider the chemistry of fats (solid) and oils (liquid).  Although we call them different names depending on whether they are liquid or solid at room temperature, fats and oils are the same chemically.  They are composed of long strings of carbon atoms, each of which has four binding sites that are available to attach to other carbons or hydrogens. 

Think of those four binding sites as two 2-seater benches on a commuter train.  The benches are situated so that they face one another, and the train still has a number of empty seats.  Now two commuters enter the train.  They have the option of sitting either directly or diagonally across from one another.  If they decide to sit directly across, they will be in a chemical configuration that is called a cis arrangement.  All the weight is on one side.  Cis arrangements make a carbon chain lopsided, floppy, and flexible, which is ideal in living, moving organisms. 

If, on the other hand, the two commuters choose to sit diagonally across from one another, they will be in a configuration that is called trans.  Think transportation, transfer, trans-Atlantic.  In this arrangement, the weight of the passengers is distributed across the benches in a more balanced, but less flexible, way.  Trans fats are stiff and stackable.  That is why they are not safe for consumption.  They may act like solid fats on the stove, but they do not behave like fat once they are eaten.  They behave like Legos®.

Trans fats have been banned in other countries, and in several cities throughout the U.S., but they have yet to be banned across our nation.  What the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has mandated is that food containing less than ½ gram of trans fat per serving may be advertised as ”trans-fat free.”  That’s not good enough.  In the case of coffee whitener, a serving is 1 tablespoon.  This morning I felt like making my coffee extra light, so I put 4 tablespoons, or ¼ cup, of milk into the mug.  If I had used coffee whitener, that would have added up to almost 2 grams of trans fat.  Just for the first cup.  So it would be easy, on any given day, to consume quite a bit of trans fat solely from trans-fat-free food.  That’s a problem.

What are our alternatives?  Skip the Crisco®, and avoid any foods that are advertised as “trans-fat free.”  Even reformulated Crisco contains “less than ½ gram of trans fat per serving.”  Bake as your foremothers did for a thousand years with, yes, butter, lard, or coconut oil, which is a solid below 75 degrees Fahrenheit.  Skip the coffee whitener and use milk or cream.  Or choose tea with honey or lemon.  Drink your coffee black, or try coconut, almond, soy, or rice milk if you’d like.  Decline to make recipes that call for margarine.  Use butter or coconut oil instead. 

We vote every time a bar code passes over a scanner, so don’t buy anything with the words “partially-hydrogenated” in its ingredient list.  There is no place for synthetic trans fats in a healthy community.