Trans fat in milk? page

[amandaroo]

Hello everyone. I have a question regarding trans fat in milk products. I have here in front of me a container of Trader Joe's Greek style plain yogurt, and I've been happily eating it for breakfast. I was looking at the label, though, and almost spit out the yogurt when I saw that it says there is 1 g of trans fat per serving! 18 g total fat, 11 saturated, 1 trans! What!

The ingredients are simply: cultured grade A pasteurized milk (from non rBST cows), cream, nonfat milk (why did they do that, I wonder?) and then a list of all the live and active cultures.

I saw on wikipedia that vaccenic acid and CLA are trans fats and occur naturally in milk products. But this is the first time I have ever seen a milk product (not counting those mainstream low-fat high sugar "yogurts" with ingredients lists a mile long) say that there are trans fats in it! I'm so confused. Is it bad? Should I throw this stuff out? I only bought it because the dairy farmer I usually buy Greek yogurt from at the farmer's market wasn't there last week (and his yogurt is sooooo good, and real). Isn't CLA supposed to be good for you? I feel so ignorant, I will do some more research, but there are so many well-educated and helpful people on this board, I wanted to tap into all of your collective knowledge. And I tried searching the boards for similar posts, and found nothing.

Thanks!!

Amanda

[TheFastCat]

There are naturally occuring trans fats as well as the hydrogenated oils you see in about every processed food. These trans fats are already present in beef and as I recall have similiar effects on the body as the human produced trans fats. Check out the extensive wikipedia article on trans fats it mentions the naturally occuring ones as well.

[amandaroo]

Ok...yeah, now I feel dumb for posting initially. I just got freaked out that it actually listed trans fat on the label, and I have just never seen that before :-/

http://www.latimes.com/features/heal...0,846200.story is a good article about it....except for the recommendation at the very end!

[Anand Srivastava]

The Trans fats in milk and other animal fats are good. One of them is CLA and the other is Vaccenic acid. CLA is highly beneficial to humans. It is even sold as supplement. Vaccenic acid is a precursor to CLA.
Don't worry about natural trans fats, worry about the artificial ones. You could worry about not getting the natural ones though.

[Chefgerry]

Also, vaccenic acid is further converted to CLA within the body.