This review consists of two parts of the viewpoints. 1. Fat and health 2. Food components affecting lipid metabolism. Each chapter mainly represents the relationships between cardiovascular disease, hyperlipidemia, obesity and fat or food components respectively. Chapter 1: Current recommendations relating to quantitative fat intake call for a reduction in total fat and saturated fat intakes. It may be more effective to focus on qualitative fat consumption than that on quantitative fat consumption, notably, decreased saturated fat and increased unsaturated fat, combined with recommendations to restrict energy intakes. Thus, this review deals with the relationships between qualitative fat consumption and diseases, especially, cardiovascular disease, for example, the relationships between saturated fatty acids, monounsaturated fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, trans fatty acids and cardiovascular disease. Chapter 2: This review mainly represents the human study related to the ameliorative action of cholesterol metabolism induced by dietary protein, peptide, amino acid. Also, this review mainly deals with the anti-obesity action induced by dietary protein, peptide.

It is paid much attention for the amount of trans fatty acid (TFA) intake in many countries because the risk of cardiovascular disease increases with increment of TFA amount in meal. On the other hand, it is also known that TFA is a general term to indicate fatty acids having trans type carboncarbon double bond in the structure and each TFA isomer has different lipid metabolism character. In this review, lipid metabolism character of each TFA isomer is reviewed and the method to solve TFA issue is explored.

Molecular system confined in nanometer-sized space provides the specific and curious structure and properties as the molecular assembly and will be good candidates for the model systems to examine “size effect” or “confinement effect” on the functional materials. Temperature shift on melting point and the anisotropic molecular arrangements are known as the typical examples of the “confinement effect” on the molecular assembly. Especially, the molecular motion in the confined molecular system is one of the important problems to understand the specific properties which are different from the bulk one. In this paper, we introduced our latest NMR studies about the dynamic behavior and the phase transition phenomenon of the confined molecular systems. At first, we demonstrated briefly the molecular motion detectable for NMR spectroscopy, and then described the potential profile which characterizes the guest-wall interaction in the 2-dimensional nanoslits. Next, we discussed the effect of the potential field on the dynamic behavior in the cases of heavy water and adamantane confined in activated carbon fiber. Finally, we discussed the specific phase transition phenomenon of the confined molecular system, in which the confinement plays an important role to the occurrence.