Last week, I attended the Rose Cafe where Jonathan Robin discussed fats. He described a long history of the different perspectives and cultural angles of fat. For something that is such a common thing, it was interesting to hear about the different perspectives, not only from cultural angles, but from a historical perspective and the trends in fat consumption that were assumed to occur, and in some case did not. An example of this from the talk was that chemists thought animal fats would be replaced by other sources of fat, yet that did not occur. We discussed many types of fats, like trans fat and the environmental impacts of these fats, which I think is often overlooked. When discussing fats in daily life, I typically only think of the percentages on the back of a food product on a nutrition fact label, rather than where these fats are actually coming from, and I think I need to be more cognizant of this, as it is important to realize the impact of the food industry. It can be hard, since some of the environmental destruction is not occurring in our own country, but it is an important thing to keep in mind.

The talk also discussed the role of the FDA in regulating these fats. While I do think some regulation may be beneficial, it can be somewhat misleading. For instance, he discussed the fact that although trans fat has been pretty much eliminated, less than a gram of trans fat is equated to zero in the FDA’s mind, even though there may actually be a minuscule amount of trans fat in that product. This surprised me, and made me want to find out more about nutrition and think about my food more often before I eat it. In high school and freshman year of college, I essentially ate whatever I wanted and thought nothing of it. I have come to realize that eating ice cream every day and eating fried food may taste good, but I need to start eating healthy as my metabolism slows down and before my eating habits catch up to me. While this took me a while to realize, I am glad that I have, and this talk really illuminated the importance of my lifestyle change.