Article: Saturated fat

For other uses, see Saturated fat (disambiguation).

Saturated fat is fat that consists of triglycerides containing only saturated fatty acids. Saturated fatty acids have no double bonds between the carbon atoms of the fatty acid chain (hence, they are fully saturated with hydrogen atoms). There are several kinds of naturally occurring saturated fatty acids, with their only difference being the number of carbon atoms - from 1 to 24. Some common examples of saturated fatty acids are butyric acid with 4 carbon atoms (contained in butter), lauric acid with 12 carbon atoms (contained in Breast milk, coconut oil, palm oil, and cocoa butter), myristic acid with 14 carbon atoms (contained in cow milk and dairy products), palmitic acid with 16 carbon atoms (contained in meat) and stearic acid with 18 carbon atoms (also contained in meat).

Fat that occurs naturally in living matter such as animals and plants is used as food for human consumption and contains a varying proportion of saturated and unsaturated fat. Foods that contain a high proportion of saturated fat are butter, ghee, suet, tallow, lard, coconut oil, cottonseed oil and palm kernel oil, dairy products (especially cream and cheese), meat as well as some prepared foods.

Dehydrogenation converts saturated fats to unsaturated fats, while hydrogenation accomplishes the reverse.

Health issues

Diets high in saturated fat correlate in some studies with an increased incidence of atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease. Some studies suggest replacing saturated fats in the diet with unsaturated fats will increase one's ratio of HDL to LDL serum cholesterol.

Controversy

It has been alleged that the many studies of saturated fat in the diet do not distinguish between saturated fat and trans fat. Some claim that saturated fat (in the absence of trans fat) is healthful; for example, foods such as peanuts and pure peanut butter (i.e. peanut butter having no added partially hydrogenated vegetable oil) contain saturated fat but no trans fat. Such foods may be beneficial or may be a health hazard; no research specific to this question has as yet been done.

Another confounding issue may be the formation of exogenous (outside the body) Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs) and oxidation products generated during cooking, which it appears some of the studies have not controlled for. It has been suggested that, "given the prominence of this type of food in the human diet, the deleterious effects of high-fat foods may be in part due to the high content in glycotoxins, above and beyond those due to oxidized fatty acid derivatives." (Koschinsky, 1997) The glycotoxins, as he called them, are more commonly called AGEs.

Table

Source: Composition of Foods. Fats and Oils. AH No. 8-4. U.S.D.A.

Molecular description

Two-dimensional representation of the saturated fatty acid myristic acid.

Three-dimensional representation of the saturated fatty acid myristic acid.

See also

• Advanced Glycation Endproducts
• Unsaturated fat
  • Monounsaturated fat
  • Polyunsaturated fat
  • Trans fat