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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff, Lauren

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Speaker 1: Vogelbam here. I'm going to start this one off by

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Speaker 1: saying that nutrition is complicated. Our bodies are gloriously weird,

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Speaker 1: and there's still a lot we don't know about how

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Speaker 1: they work, including exactly how the food that we eat

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Speaker 1: affects us. Despite actual millennia of trying to use food

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Speaker 1: to fix pretty much every ailment you can think of

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Speaker 1: around the world, the earliest cookbooks were mostly medical advice.

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Speaker 1: Over the years, all kinds of health based diet trends

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Speaker 1: have emerged. Apple cider vinegar as a weight loss agent

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Speaker 1: may have first been promoted by the poet Lord Byron

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Speaker 1: back in the eighteen twenties. Is Sylvester Graham, who technically

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Speaker 1: invented Graham crackers in the eighteen thirties, thought that unseasoned,

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Speaker 1: cold whole wheat and hard beds would keep you healthy.

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Speaker 1: He would not enjoy what we've done with Graham crackers today.

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Speaker 1: And there was a fellow back in the seventeen twenties

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Speaker 1: who simply recommended avoiding swamps to keep yourself slim. A

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Speaker 1: little more recently, there was a major push against fats

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Speaker 1: and cholesterol in our foods. Of people and perhaps particularly marketers,

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Speaker 1: began to wonder whether we could make processed foods healthier,

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Speaker 1: or at least make more people buy them if we

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Speaker 1: could just take the fat out. If you're older then

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Speaker 1: say ten, and perhaps especially if you lived through the

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Speaker 1: eighties and nineties, you probably remember when every product in

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Speaker 1: the grocery store was touting itself as low fat or

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Speaker 1: low cholesterol. By the way, this was the result of

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Speaker 1: a massive campaign vilifying fat in our diets launched by

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Speaker 1: the sugar industry in the nineteen forties. They had doctors

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Speaker 1: and researchers on their payroll. We only started to publicly

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Speaker 1: untangle all of this in the past decade or so.

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Speaker 1: Like Twizzlers still sometimes has the words a low fat

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Speaker 1: snack on their packaging, but they didn't really contain any

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Speaker 1: fat to begin with. So all right, if you're looking

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Speaker 1: at something like potato chips, cheese, cookies, or yogurt, how

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Speaker 1: did these products lose their fat content? First off, let's

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Speaker 1: talk about what fat is. We all know what it

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Speaker 1: tastes like or perhaps looks like in our food, but

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Speaker 1: when you zoom in on the chemical structure, you'll find

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Speaker 1: that all fats have in common long chains of carbon atoms,

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Speaker 1: with some oxygen and hydrogen atoms thrown in to keep

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Speaker 1: things interesting. Those long carbon chains and fat molecules make

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Speaker 1: it really hard for fats to dissolve in water, so

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Speaker 1: generally to get them to dissolve, you need some sort

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Speaker 1: of organic solvent like chloroform or methylene chloride. You may

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Speaker 1: at first think that washing our fatty foods with one

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Speaker 1: of these solvents would do the trick of removing the fat.

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Speaker 1: It's a good thought, after all, that's often how they

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Speaker 1: remove the caffeine from coffee and tea, but fat actually

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Speaker 1: does a lot for our foods, and simply extracting or

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Speaker 1: dissolving way the fat will leave us with foods that

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Speaker 1: don't really resemble their original versions. A fat doesn't just

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Speaker 1: add flavor in calories, but also creates texture, helps cooked

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Speaker 1: foods brown, and even extends shelf life. So before we

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Speaker 1: just get rid of the fat, we need to think

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Speaker 1: about how to keep all that flavor and texture in

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Speaker 1: foods so that they're still tasty. Lots of foods, like

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Speaker 1: many fruits, vegetables, and grains, contain only tiny amounts of

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Speaker 1: fat to start with. But let's look at dairy products.

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Speaker 1: When we first obtain milk from a cow or goat,

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Speaker 1: et cetera, it has a good bit of fat in it.

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Speaker 1: So how do we take whole milk and create skim milk? Oh,

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Speaker 1: the process is pretty simple. Manufacturers put the whole milk

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Speaker 1: into a centrifuge that separates out the fat portion for

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Speaker 1: cream or butter and leaves behind skim milk. The skim

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Speaker 1: milk can then be used to make other dairy products

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Speaker 1: like yogurt or ice cream that are either low fat

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Speaker 1: or no fat. However, many of these non fat dairy

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Speaker 1: products that are made from skim milk run into the

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Speaker 1: problems we mentioned before. They don't taste as good, their

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Speaker 1: textures are strange, and they may not last as long

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Speaker 1: in our refrigerators. Manufacturers therefore turn to science in order

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Speaker 1: to get flavor, texture, and longevity back in the form

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Speaker 1: of additives. Many low fat or no fat products are

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Speaker 1: created in this way, not by taking the fat out,

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Speaker 1: but by never putting the fat in to begin with.

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Speaker 1: In the past, food manufacturers experimented with fat replacements like

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Speaker 1: a lestra, but they have yet to find much success

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Speaker 1: in their use. The side effects of these materials resulted

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Speaker 1: in very poor sales. Let's just leave it at the

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Speaker 1: phrase anal leakage. Okay, so a leustra aside. Instead of

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Speaker 1: making a food product, let's say a cookie and sucking

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Speaker 1: the fat out, which would leave something behind that is

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Speaker 1: no longer anything like a cookie, food scientists need to

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Speaker 1: create that cookie from the start, using non fat based

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Speaker 1: additives to compensate for all that fat brings to the cookie.

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Speaker 1: Let's start with flavor. Fatty cookie ingredients like butter and

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Speaker 1: eggs add a lot of flavor to make up for

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Speaker 1: the lack of flavor. When those items aren't used, manufactures

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Speaker 1: add in spices, flavorings, and sugar to trick us into

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Speaker 1: not noticing the missing fat. This is why low and

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Speaker 1: non fat foods aren't always less caloric as their diet

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Speaker 1: name might imply. They often have a ton of extra

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Speaker 1: sugar added. A sugar can also help with the texture

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Speaker 1: in baked goods a butt. Manufacturers often add food binders

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Speaker 1: or thickeners to help make up for the missing fat.

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Speaker 1: Things like pectin, guargum, locus bingum, potato starch, and tappyocha

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Speaker 1: starch will glom onto water molecules and swell up, replicating

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Speaker 1: the full creamy feel of fat and helping retain moisture.

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Speaker 1: In some cases, they and the extra water they require

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Speaker 1: to work, may need extra science help from an added

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Speaker 1: emulsifier or preservative to keep everything together and, in the

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Speaker 1: case of those cookies, make them more shelf stable. A

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Speaker 1: note that all of these additives are generally recognized as safe.

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Speaker 1: It's honestly the extra and perhaps unexpected sugar you should

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Speaker 1: be concerned with. As researchers have started to untangle that

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Speaker 1: sugar versus fat issue, they found that excess sugar, not fat,

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Speaker 1: is more strongly linked with heart disease. So long story short,

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Speaker 1: getting the fat out of fat free foods, for the

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Speaker 1: most part, actually means never putting it in to begin with.

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Speaker 1: What goes in the place of fat varies, but you'll

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Speaker 1: often end up with a highly processed food product. And look,

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Speaker 1: these days, whole and natural can be marketing terms as

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Speaker 1: much as fat free. The only text you should be

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Speaker 1: really concerned with on a food package is its nutrition label.

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Speaker 1: That'll tell you how much fat and sugar and other

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Speaker 1: stuff the product contains, and that in turn will let

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Speaker 1: you avoid what you really want to avoid or to

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Speaker 1: have a treat. As we've said before, treats are nice.

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Speaker 1: Today's episode is based on the article how do they

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Speaker 1: get the fat out of fat free Foods? On how

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Speaker 1: stuffworks dot com written by Mesas Salida brain Stuff It

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Speaker 1: is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com,

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Speaker 1: and it's produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my

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Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

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Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.