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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The food industry and the USDA's ballyhooed war on trans fat distracts Americans from their real problem: They eat too much of the wrong food.
Mar 7, 2005 | In the past few months, I've gotten sucked into the newest food fear: trans fat. The artery-hardening enemy du jour is a fat that's now thought to be so incontrovertibly bad for you that even the notoriously laissez-faire Bush administration recently advised citizens to consume as little of the stuff as possible.
I've heeded the call by dutifully scrutinizing the ingredients list on every granola bar, box of crackers and jar of peanut butter in the kitchen cupboard for traces of this new public enemy No. 1 in the fat-ass American diet. And now that the cupboard's purged of foods that include "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" or shortening, it looks a lot barer than it did a few months ago.
Which is why I am now in crispy bliss, eating a big plate of fried squid in Tiburon. The waterfront hamlet across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County is the kind of community where folks longing to buy a new $10 million estate "will find everything they need," as one local real estate agency claims. I journeyed to Tiburon because it has proclaimed itself the first "trans fat free city" in America. While most restaurants have been slow to take trans fat off the menu, all 18 restaurants in this tony town have voluntarily agreed not to use fat made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil when they deep-fry or bake, making their town just a little bit more health-conscious than pretty much everyone else's.
It's a message that's served up right in the front window of Servino Restaurant on Main Street. A green heart-shaped sign says: "We use trans fat FREE cooking oil. Ask us for a leaflet."
After I help my husband Jim polish off the 30-piece appetizer of fried Monterey calamari, I lay into a 12-inch pepperoni pizza, which supposedly serves one. Jim has four veal medallions glistening with prosciutto and fontina. For dessert we split an order of profiteroles -- two baseball-size pastries stuffed with vanilla ice cream and doused in dark Godiva chocolate. Yum. And it's trans fat free!
Earlier in the day, Jim had run 10 miles. But I had done nothing more strenuous than walk to and from the car. So by the time the check comes I'm already vowing silently to never ... eat ... again.
That's the paradox of the great trans fat purge that leaves nutritionists and public-health advocates frustrated at the "zero grams trans fat"-hype now sweeping a grocery aisle near you. Sure, trans fat should go. Who doesn't think that?
But nutritionists fear that focusing on one ingredient creates the illusion that purging it will make up for our other crimes against the waistline. Health advocates say the war on trans fat has become little more than a marketing opportunity for the major food companies to continue serving junk food with a healthy conscience. Meanwhile, with its new guidelines about avoiding trans fat, the USDA can appear to be doing the healthy thing without really causing the food companies to change their fatty ways.
"PepsiCo had full-page ads in major national newspapers saying that Doritos and Fritos are now trans fat free -- 0 grams trans fat," says Marion Nestle, professor and chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. "So they took the trans fat out. Now they're a health food? Give me a break. It's a calorie distractor."
So much for my health-conscious dinner of fried squid, pepperoni pizza, vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.
