14 DAY TRIAL // The inclusion of dietary trans fatty acids (dTFA) in diets can make people more aggressive and irritable, with no regard to gender, age, ethnicity or race, investigators say. The finding is very curious, and will undoubtedly elicit a lot of attention from other researchers as well.
The work was led by experts at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, who surveyed more than 1,000 people for this investigation. Men and women alike displayed behaviors ranging from impatience to open aggression, if they consumed dTFA beforehand.
This is the first investigation to demonstrate this negative correlation. The process that leads to the appearance of trans fatty acids is called hydrogenation, and it can occur naturally in the kitchen.
Most of the time, it happens when unsaturated oils turn solid at room temperature, such as when they are left in the open overnight. Large amounts of such acids can be found in margarines, shortenings and many prepared foods.
According to the UCSD team, high dTFA levels have been linked to disorders in lipid levels, metabolic functions, resistance to insulin, cardiac health, oxidation and inflammation, among others, PsychCentral reports.
During the new study, researchers looked over 945 baseline dietary information and behavioral assessment charts belonging to a diverse test group. They were looking for any statistically significant links between aggression, irritability and dTFA intake.
“We found that greater trans fatty acids were significantly associated with greater aggression, and were more consistently predictive of aggression and irritability, across the measures tested, than the other known aggression predictors that were assessed,” Beatrice Golomb MD, PhD explains.
“If the association between trans fats and aggressive behavior proves to be causal, this adds further rationale to recommendations to avoid eating trans fats, or including them in foods provided at institutions like schools and prisons, since the detrimental effects of trans fats may extend beyond the person who consumes them to affect others,” she adds.
Golomb holds an appointment as an associate professor in the UC San Diego Department of Medicine. She was also the author of a paper detailing the findings, which appears in the latest online issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.