Fats and Oils

Abstract

Fats and oils are classified as lipids, which comprise an important category of nutrients for humans; the other two important categories of nutrients, of course, are proteins and carbohydrates. As the reader may recall from Chapter 9, lipids are esters of glycerol and fatty acids, and fatty acids are mostly long, straight, hydrocarbon chains, with varying degrees of hydrogen saturation of the carbon atoms, having a carboxyl group linked to one of the end-carbon atoms. The esterfication reaction may be reversed with the addition of an alkali, which results in a combination of the fatty acids with the alkali to form soap, a reaction called saponification.