Why I stopped eating biscuits

Don’t eat biscuits. They are full of sugar and trans fats. Trans fats are the Ugly in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’
There are good fats and bad fats and there are good fats that have been made ugly by greedy people making their fortunes off artificially creating room temperature solid fats from the good fats.
The Good: UNSATURATED FATS
Found mainly in vegetables (corn, soy, canola, sunflower etc) and fish and contain a high proportion of unsaturated fatty acids. They are typically liquid at room temperature and contribute to lower levels of cholesterol in the blood. At a molecular level they are a fat with at least one available bonding site not filled with a hydrogen atom and may be mono or poly unsaturated. It is this that is exploited by food manufacturers to make these good fats ugly.
The Bad: SATURATED FATS.
Not so bad really. They are naturally occurring fats found in animal foods, butter, full fat dairy products, fatty meats, chicken skin etc. They can usually be identified because they are solid at room temperatures. They are necessary to our growth development and wellbeing. The only thing bad about them is that we can over indulge. They can increase bad cholesterol (LDL) if consumed in excess.
The Ugly : the killers: TRANS FATS
Artificially manufactured from unsaturated fats. Also called partially hydrogenated oil.
You might recall from when you were younger how nice an Arnott’s biscuit tasted and now it doesn’t seem to be as good as you remember. There is a reason for that. At about the time they were bought out by the American company, Campbell’s Soups the recipe was changed to reduce costs and increase product shelf life. The change was to take out expensive saturated fats like butter (and eggs I think), which gave the biscuit all its taste and texture and goodness and replace it with trans fats. They also introduced corn syrup (as a cheaper substitute for sugar) and corn meal into traditional products.
Take a packet of biscuits that states, per 100 grams;
Total fat - 22 grams
Saturated Fat - 11.9 grams.
You can be sure that for every 100 grams consumed that 22 – 11.9 = 10.1 grams (ouch) of trans fat is are going towards screwing with your cholesterol and clogging up your blood vessels.

Another more recent example is Cadbury’s. Traditional quality chocolate does not contain trans fats. It does contain cocoa which contains high levels of flavonoids and antioxidants, which are beneficial to the cardiovascular system. Last year Cadbury reduced the size of a block of chocolate and substituted cocoa with hydrogenated palm oil – trans fat. This was a cost cutting exercise. Cocoa prices have been increasing due to dry weather where is it grown and thanks to deforestation in equatorial regions, palm oil is cheaper than cocoa. The new recipe chocolate was unsatisfying, melted easily and left a waxy taste in your mouth - yuck. In Australia the customer reaction was so adverse that Cadbury CEO was forced to apologise and they reverted to the old recipe. The block size did stay small.
Trans fats are artificially produced by a process called hydrogenation, the heating of (Good) unsaturated vegetable fats in the presence of hydrogen (a process invented in 1910. This is the exploitation mentioned earlier) with the aim to produce a cheaper product, that is solid at room temperature and increase product shelf life. A trans fat does not go rancid as quickly. That’s why it is favoured in manufactured biscuits, crackers and cookies. Partially hydrogenated cooking oil also lasts longer and therefore favoured for deep frying foods at fast food outlets. That’s why fast foods are usually loaded with trans fats.
Trans fats are linked to coronary disease because you get the double whammy, they not only raise LDL (bad cholesterol), they lower the body’s ability to create HDL (good cholesterol)
The human is body unable to metabolize trans fat. Lipases are water-soluble enzymes in the body that perform essential roles in the digestion, transport, and processing of dietary fats and oils. The human lipase enzyme is ineffective on trans fats, so the trans fat remains in the blood stream for a much longer period of time and is more prone to arterial deposition and subsequent plaque formation.
The national Academy of Sciences states that ‘there is no safe level of trans fat consumption’. That; ‘it is not essential and provides no known benefit to human health’. The only reason trans fats have not been banned entirely is that a very small amount of trans fats occur naturally and it is not understood what function this plays in overall diet and health. That’s the official reason anyway.
Unlike America, in Australia the reason you can’t find appropriate labelling so you can understand how much trans fat you are consuming is that Australia's food labelling laws do not require trans fats to be shown separately from the total fat content. What you can do is, from the label, subtract the stated ‘saturated fat’ from the ‘total fat’ and the result is unsaturated fat (good) and trans fat (ugly). Depending on the food type, and because good fat is liquid at room temperature the quantity of fat likely is ugly trans fat.
The manufacturers must be well connected politically because even in the US where labelling is now mandatory, 0.5 grams can be labelled as zero grams. Go figure?
One small bit of good news is that advances in food technology have made it possible to produce margarines without depending so much on hydrogenation. There is now no valid technical reason for manufacturers to continue to use hydrogenated fats and oils. Margarine in Australia has been free of trans fat since 1996.
Manufacturers recognising the potential for tobacco style litigation are working to minimise trans fats in their products by substituting them with Palm Oil. Even that is not such good news. A 2006 study supported by the National Institutes of Health and the USDA Agricultural Research Service concluded that ‘palm oil is not a safe substitute for trans fats in the food industry’, because it too (palm oil) results in adverse changes in the blood concentrations of LDL (bad cholesterol) just as trans fat does.
That’s just Trans Fats. Don’t get me started on sugar – It is sugar not fat that puts the weight on you. So when you eat 100 grams of biscuits, you not only get 12 grams of trans fat for your arteries, you get 34 grams of sugar for your hips.
Want another biscuit now?