I was making tosti's today, and had myself wondering whether tosti's are as unhealthy as many people look at them.

I mean, if you think about it, tosti's (or sandwitches) are 2 slices of bread, with butter, cheese and ham/salami (plus perhaps some ketchup too). That is in fact not much more than what you would normally have for lunch. At least I don't think heating them up means making them more unhealthy.

On the other hand, when you make tosti's you normally don't just make one, you make more. Plus that if you're like me, you don't use a small amount of ketchup. Also, for the nice taste, adding a bit of extra cheese or butter is something that I tend to do more easily when I make something nice like tosti's. For these reasons I can imagine that having tosti's as lunch would be more unhealthy than just taking a regular lunch.

But what is unhealthy food?

From what I understand from my chemistry study guide (that's right), unhealthy food is normally defined as "containing a large concentration of saturated fatty acids". For those not interested in this kind of things, you can probably stop reading here -> x <- . Saturated fatty acids are large carbon chains, with a COOH head. They are shaped as pretty much linear molecules, allowing them to be packed quite closely together, giving them a high melting point. This means that at body temperature, 37 degrees Celcius, these fatty acids will clump together into clumps. These balls are quite dangerous to your body, as they can stick to the side of your blood vessel. If more clumps stick to the sides, this will mean that your blood vessels get more narrow, and less blood is allowed to pass through. If this process continues, your blood vessels will close off eventually, and there iwl be a good chance of getting heart diseases from it. Fortunately, if you want this to happen you will need to eat at the mac donald's pretty much every day.

The "good fatty acids", the unsaturated fatty acids, are much more healthy for you. They have a double C=C bond in the middle of its carbon chain, which shapes them as a "V" structure, rather than a linear structure. Because of intermolecular forces (forces the molecules excert on each other), these molecules need more space than saturated fatty acids. This gives a far lower melting point, meaning that the unsatuated fatty acids are liquid at room temperature. This makes them far more easy to transport through the bloodstream, and willl not make them stick to the walls of the blood vessels. Therefore, unsaturated fatty acids are more healthy than saturated fatty acids.

So that leaves the question whether tosti's contain a lot of saturated fatty acids. I would say it depends a bit. You have margarine, which has a lot of unsaturated fatty acids in it, while butter has a lot of saturated fatty acids. Also, there are big differences in how fat different cheeses are.

So now I am still puzzled what to think.

But since I like tosti's so much, I am very tempted to go for the "tosti's are healthy" side, since that makes it feel as if they are not so bad, even though it is not a way of being sure about it.

And yes, I might have been revising chemistry today

Greets,

Bart

for this blog have not been killed any butterflies, whales or ash cloud particles