R. Elaine Turner, assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Florida, sees the current interest in trans fat as part of a long cycle of getting food manufacturers to reformulate foods that doesn't necessarily improve anyone's overall health. When fat was the enemy 10 or 15 years ago, companies made low-fat and fat-free products. When carbs were bad, they took out sugars and carbohydrates. Now, trans fat has to go.

"We keep in this cycle rather than just cutting down on things that provide us with a lot of calories and fat and not very many nutrients," Turner says. "Instead of eating less of those, we encourage manufacturers to reformulate those to seem more attractive, at least initially. 'Oh, it's fat free, it must be good for me.' Not necessarily. 'Oh, it's trans free, it must be good for me.' Not necessarily."

It wasn't long ago that dietitians used to recommend trans fat as a substitute for saturated fat. "We made a terrible mistake with trans fat," says Kris-Etherton. "We thought they were good. We thought it was a good replacement for saturated fat. And it turned out to be a bad thing to do." All the more reason that Americans need more specific guidance about what to do about it now.

And the vague new federal guideline "to keep trans fatty acid consumption as low as possible" isn't helping. Kris-Etherton's committee recommended that Americans be advised to limit their daily trans fat intake to less than 1 percent of overall calories. "You can see I'm frosted about this," she says. "One percent would be success. It would make an impact. For a lot of people, they'd be decreasing intake by twofold, and with a lot of other people it would be even more."

Nor are the new food-labeling laws models of clarity. They allow some amount of trans fat in foods that say "zero" on the label. Take the Quaker Oats Chewy Granola Bar, a snack food marketed to parents as a healthier alternative to potato chips, cookies, pretzels, donuts and even loose trail mix. Personally, I used to eat it every day until I saw the dreaded "partially hydrogenated oil" in the ingredient list, and it had to go.

In the past year, the granola has been reformulated, reducing the amount of trans fat from 1 to 1.5 grams per serving -- depending on the flavor -- to less than half a gram per serving. Food and Drug Administration guidelines say that if there is less than half a gram, the packaging can read zero trans fat.

However, nutritionists are not really worried about lesser levels of trans fat. "It's a bizarre labeling quirk," Nestle says. "If you don't eat too much of it, it doesn't matter much. It's not a poison." I guess I can put the Quaker Oats Chewy Granola bars back in my cupboard.

More troubling to Nestle is the twisted way that the fight against trans fat gives food companies something to do in the obesity epidemic that won't interfere with their bottom line, while the American waistline only grows bigger. She maintains that in a business that depends on cheap government-subsidized staples such as corn and soybeans, the food companies are under constant pressure to get customers to stuff more and more into their mouths.

"The real root of the problem is Wall Street," Nestle says. "You've got a situation in which every company is trying to grow and there's only so much people can eat." While valiantly working to take trans fat out of their food products -- and advertise that fact -- companies can look as though they're doing their part to improve Americans' health without cutting into profits: "In a sense, it's a bone thrown to the food industry: Here's something you can do to clean up your act that won't put you out of business," she says.

And the government neatly avoids antagonizing the food industry by never saying you shouldn't eat what they're selling. Imagine federal dietary standards that said, "Stop eating Big Macs, Doritos and Oreos," Simon, of the Center for Informed Food Choices, has written. "Those are recommendations that most Americans could understand, but not ones we are likely to hear."

I asked the owner of the Tiburon restaurant that was the scene of my delicious debauch about his decision to switch from trans fat to rice oil for frying. "When you read how bad those oils are, you worry about your own health and the health of your customers," Angelo Servino told me. "Life is not all about profit sometimes."

He already used olive oil for most dishes, but now he fries in rice oil, which costs more than the trans fat stuff. Americans typically eat one in five meals out at restaurants that are under no obligation to disclose what kind of grease they're clogging their customers' arteries with. And some 40 percent of those meals are picked up from fast-food restaurants. Servino said he hopes to set an example for other restaurants.

I couldn't help thinking that shrinking the portion sizes might set a better example. Yet that would risk cutting into the bottom-line of food suppliers and restaurants and likely go against customers' expectations. After all, when we were happily stuffing our faces, my husband and I didn't say, "Um, waiter, could you bring us less chocolate, vanilla ice cream, pepperoni, veal, prosciutto and cheese?"

Pity the nutritionists, who are sounding ever more like so many Cassandras as Americans search for some easy solution -- now: 0 grams trans fat! -- while getting fatter and fatter. In my no trans fat dinner, I'm pretty sure I blew through my 267 daily "discretionary calories," allotted for such niceties as cheese, sugar and alcohol in the new 2005 federal dietary guidelines, long before the dessert arrived.

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