What do you call a parrot wearing a raincoat?

Polyunsaturated! (sorry, it had to be done at some point!)

I went out for dinner last night and then had pancakes this morning, so I’m feeling like I need to eat a little more healthily over the next few days, which got me thinking about fats.

Fats are actually a type of ester. As every high-school chemistry knows esters are “sweet smelling compounds that give fruits their characteristic odours”. Esters are also the product of a reaction between an alcohol and a carboxylic acid. Fats are a special type of ester that are made from the reaction of an alcohol called glycerol with long-chain carboxylic acids.

There are three types of fats that we often see in the nutritional information on food labels:

1. Saturated
2. Unsaturated
3. Trans

Saturated means that every carbon atom in chains is surrounded by 4 single bonds. This means that the chains are very straight and can very easily stack together, meaning that saturated fats are higher density and more likely to be solid than unsaturated fats. This can clog your arteries and so on, which is why saturated fats are bad for you!

Unsaturated fats have one or more double bonds along the chain. These can be either ‘cis’ or ‘trans’. ‘Cis’ double bonds mean that the chain will bend back on itself, creating kinks in the chain and making it harder for the chains to easily stack together, meaning they are more likely to be liquid. Mono- and poly-unsaturated refer to how many double bonds there are: mono meaning one and poly meaning many.

Trans fats are a different story. Instead of bending back on themselves and creating a big bend in the chain of the molecule, trans fats are a little bit sneaky. They arrange the double bond in such a way that the chain still remains almost perfectly straight, like saturated fats. Trans fats are basically very sneaky saturated fats in disguise.

Saturated, (cis) Unsaturated and Trans fat
(Images from Wikimedia commons)

Is it just me, or does the cis-unsaturated fat look like a caterpillar? 😛

Anyway, now you know a little bit more about the fats that we commonly consume, you can make the informed decision to choose the caterpillar rather than the weird-looking centipede (saturated fats) and definitely shy away from the lazy caterpillar (trans fats). But what is your favourite unhealthy that you enjoy eating, even though it’s really bad for you? I’d definitely have to say strawberry pancakes, because that’s what I had for breakfast and they were AMAZING! Leave a gluttonous comment below 🙂

If it starts raining, then this parrot will be “poly-very-saturated”!
(Image courtesy of Frank Vassen, http://www.flickr.com/people/42244964@N03)