A Question About Trans Fats

Nemo

I notice that with some foods, particularly bakery items, some trans fat shows up in the nutritional analysis. I thought that the use of trans fats was banned in the US. Can someone offer an explanation for this?

Hilary

Some whole foods contain trace amounts of natural trans-fatty acids. These are currently not considered as harmful as artificial trans-fats created through hydrogenation.

MartinW68

Hi, I've only been using the app for a week but I unticked the trans fats box as I didn't find it useful (always showing a full red bar despite a healthy diet). For me it would be more relevant if it separated natural and harmful trans fats. Thanks

Hilary

Thanks for the feedback @MartinW68 . When we have enough valid data available for any nutrient or nutrient sub-type delineation we will add it as an option. Unfortunately, we don't have the data for this nutrient from our primary sources for our database. We do not analyse nutrients here at Cronometer, therefore we must rely upon these sources for our database.
You can learn more about from where we source our nutrient data, in our User Manual article: Data Sources

meeeeeeeli

@Hilary I think I’m having the same issue. The ingredients I am entering have zero trans fat, but the bar is red and says 100%. Seems more like a glitch than an analysis issue, but maybe I’m not understanding your answer to @MartinW68 ?

Hilary

@meeeeeeeli if your maximum target is set to 0, anything containing even a tiny bit of trans fats will turn the bar red. We are looking into updating our target bars to hopefully make them more informative.

jefmcg

@meeeeeeeli, click on the transfat bar and see what it says.

One thing to note is that cronometer only display transfat to one decimal point, but still remembers it, even if it is less.

Eg Olive oil in the NCCDB has 1.6g of trans fat per litre. So unless you are adding 40g or more, it will display as 0.0. Eg if you add 10g of olive oil, it will show zero, but it's actually 0.016g. That's enough to make the bar red if it's set to zero, but nothing to harm you.

I just changed the maximum to a gram, because it's only going to come from natural ingredients (I don't buy things with hydrogenated or "vegetable" oil in the ingredients and anyway trans fat isn't on UK labels), so I don't care.

You could change yours to something lower - 0.1 g, that will probably still get rid of the red bar.

meeeeeeeli

@Hilary I found the culprit. When you search Chia Seeds, the first result and the one recommended says it has zero trans fat but is turning the bar red anyway. I changed my recipe to contain a different chia seed entry.

jefmcg

😂 that was a lot of typing considering you have solve it.

Chia seeds contain about the same amount of trans fat as olive oil. If you have found an entry that doesn't list that, then it's not as complete nutritionally as the entry that does.