Silverware Thief

What do interesterified fat and prenatal urination have in common? Nothing, except I learned something new about both of them recently. It would be very interesting if they had something more in common than that. As it is, I found what I learned about both to be both educational and interesting. Perhaps you will also find it so.

Interesterified Fat

When I came home from my Tuesday bike ride Grandma asked me what interesterified meant. Except, she pronounced it “Interest-er-fied.” I had no idea if it was even really a word and asked her where she had seen it. She then showed me the ingredient list on the back of the saltine crackers box where it said, “Contains one or more of the following oils: interesterified soybean, canola, palm.” I was stumped, having never seen the word before, but made my best guess at the word’s meaning. Not satisfied with that, I went to look up the meaning on the internet. And what is where my education began.

According to Wikipedia:

Interesterified fats are oils that have been chemically modified (e.g., turning soybean oil into interesterified soybean oil). This is done in order to make them more solid, less liable to go rancid and more stable for applications such as deep frying. The interesterification process is used as an alternative to partial hydrogenation, which results in trans fats. However, research indicates that interesterified fats may pose health risks, some greater in magnitude than trans fats.

Wisegeek has a good short piece on interesterified fats, which is well worth the read. It begins:

When scientific studies exposed the inherent dangers to public health in trans fats, many processed food manufacturers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. They needed to find a form of fat which would still provide the extended shelf life of partially-hydrogenated oils, but did not contain trans fatty acids. One solution arrived in the form of interesterified fat, a fully hydrogenated product with many of the same characteristics as trans fat, but closer to saturated fat chemically. Interesterified fat is produced through a process called interesterification, which rearranges the molecular structure of fatty plant oils.

It goes on to say that, “The problem with interesterified fat for consumers is that in many ways the cure is worse than the disease. If you would like to know more, you can finish read the Wisegeek article, and even look through a Google search on interesterified.

After all that, you can start looking for interesterified fats in the products you buy. You’ll find flaky crackers tend to either have partially hydrogenated oil or interesterified oil. I haven’t looked at other products.

Prenatal Urination

The discovery of prenatal urination came about because I was discussing with my sister the difficulties someone we knew was having with their pregnancy. A particular problem was a low level of amniotic fluid. Amniotic fluid, in case you didn’t know, “is the watery liquid surrounding and cushioning a growing fetus within the amnion. It allows the fetus to move freely without the walls of the uterus being too tight against its body. Buoyancy is also provided” (see Wikipedia).

This much I knew. But my sister, in looking up the causes and possible effects of this problem, pointed out to me what amniotic fluid is. That is, “Amniotic fluid is primarily produced by the mother until 16 weeks of gestation” but after that point, “In the late stages of gestation much of the amniotic fluid consists of foetal urine.” Thus low amniotic fluid “can be caused by infection, kidney dysfunction or malformation” in the unborn infant, as the child, in effect, is not filling their mother’s womb with enough urine.

There is a mental picture for you.

Which is all to say the pressing question of, “Do babies pee before they are born?” has been answered. If someone asks, now you can tell them.

But as to where that urine goes . . . well, people might not want to know. Expectant mothers may not care to know that they are walking around with a belly full of baby pee.