One of the hard facts of life is that things we love to eat, our body hates. While we wish we could have lived on burgers, pizzas, pastries and kachories, life is not always so kind. And sooner or later it shows on the weighing scale and on our lipid profile. Wouldn’t it be great if there were something that could magically make the fat disappear from the foods we like? Unfortunately till something like this is invented we are left to fend for ourselves, exercising and counting our calories. But given that there is no magical machine, how exactly do fat-free cookies and cake lose their fat content?
Start with zero
Dairy products are a good place to start. When we first get milk, it has a good bit of fat in it. For many, that’s unwanted fat. How do we get whole milk down to skim? The process is pretty simple. Manufacturers put the whole milk into a centrifuge that separates the heavy fat portion into cream and leaves behind skim milk. This skim milk can then be used to make other dairy products like yogurt and sour cream that are either low-fat or nonfat. However, the problem is that these don’t taste good, their textures are funny, and they may not last as long in our refrigerators.
According to howstuffworks.com, dairy products in this category, like fat-free cheese, need to be made the way many diet products are created: not by taking fat out, but by never putting the fat in to begin with.
Instead of making a food product let’s say a cookie and sucking the fat out (leaving behind something that is no longer anything like a cookie), food scientists need to create that cookie from the start using nonfat-based additives instead of fat to compensate for all that fat brings to the cookie.
Sugar bombs
Let’s start with flavor. Fatty cookie ingredients like butter and eggs add a lot of flavor. To make up for the lack of flavor when those items aren’t used, manufacturers add in extra spices and a lot more sugar to trick us into not noticing the missing fat. This is why low and nonfat foods aren’t always less caloric, as their “diet” name might imply; they often have a ton of extra sugar added.
Getting the fat out of fat-free foods, for the most part, actually means never putting the fat in there to begin with. What goes in the place of fat varies, but you’ll often end up with a highly processed food product that may be quite different from its fatty counterpart.
