Doughnut (Iced)

Food · Grain · Food, Typed Supps

The only thing in this batch with more than a gram of trans fat per hundred.

Stage by stage

Iced and fried (The doughnut): Deep-frying supplies the fat; the icing supplies most of the 22.7 g of added sugar.
Free sugar (Circulation): Around 15 g in one doughnut — close to a day’s conditional limit.
Trans fat (Liver): 1.11 g per 100 g, and it raises LDL while lowering HDL — unique among fats.
No limit here (Policy): Australia has no mandatory cap on industrial trans fat, unlike the EU, US and Canada.

Timing

Nothing to time. Frequency is the only lever, since the label gives you no way to distinguish between products.

Time to effect

Per doughnut: Around 15 g free sugar and 0.7 g trans fat at 65 g.
Weeks: Lipid response to a sustained change in trans fat intake.

Allergens

Contains: Gluten. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.

Eating patterns

Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.

Satiety

68 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — low. Measured by Holt et al. (1995).

Environmental footprint

1.6 kg CO2e and 648 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Wheat & rye" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.

Cost band

Cheap — roughly £2.5 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.

Key nutrients

Sugar
Saturated fat

Nutrition per 100g

Calories: 363
Protein: 6.7g
Carbohydrate: 48.2g
of which sugars: 22.9g
Fat: 15.9g
of which saturated: 6.9g
Fibre: 1.7g
Sodium: 414mg

Food vs. supplement

Industrial trans fat is the only dietary fat that moves both LDL and HDL in the wrong direction at once. That is why WHO called for its removal from the food supply rather than for moderation — and why the Australian position of voluntary reformulation is a genuine outlier.

Kitchen tip

You cannot check this on the label — Australian labelling does not require trans fat to be declared unless a claim is made about it.

Common myth

“If trans fat were really that bad, it would be banned here.” In reality: It is banned, or capped, across the EU, the US, Canada and dozens of other countries — WHO called for its elimination from the global food supply. Australia has relied on voluntary reformulation instead. And Australian labelling does not require trans fat to be declared unless a related claim is made, so there is no way to check which products contain it.