Trade Guidelines on Reducing Trans Fats in Food

There is growing evidence indicating that trans fats intake is linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. This set of guidelines aims at
encouraging and assisting trade to adopt sound nutritional theory in food production and provide healthy food for the public with respect to reducing
trans fats in food.

Introduction on trans fats
2. All animal and plant sources of fats contain fatty acids, which can be saturated or unsaturated.Unsaturated fatty acids can further be classified as monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. In terms of chemical structure, trans fats are classified as unsaturated fats. They have one or more carbon-carbon double bonds in trans configuration. This makes them different from other unsaturated fats. Rather, they have properties more like saturated fats. Saturated fats are known risk factor for coronary heart disease since they increase low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the bad cholesterol in blood. In addition to this characteristic, trans fats also reduce the high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, the good cholesterol. As a result, trans fats are considered to be more harmful to health than saturated fats. Public should try to reduce the amount of trans fats intake and food producers are urged to reduce trans fats level in food.

3. One of our main dietary sources of intake of trans fats is from food produced with hydrogenatedvegetable oil. Vegetable oil, after the process called hydrogenation, will turn from liquid to semi-solid or solid form. This process of hydrogenation will produce trans fats in the product at the same time.Higher degree of hydrogenation results in a more solid state of the oil. In principle, fully hydrogenated oil should contain no trans fats since all the double bonds will be saturated, but this fat will become hard. Hydrogenated vegetable oils are commonly used to produce or prepare bakery and fried products since they can increase shelf life of the products, change the texture of the food and are usually lower in cost. Besides these artificially produced trans fats, we may also intake trans fats from natural sources. For example, small amount of trans fats are naturally present in milk and fat of cow and sheep. Food products made with these ingredients usually only contain low level of trans fats. In addition, in highly refined oil, very low level of trans fats may also be present.