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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The race is on to take the manmade trans fat out of pretty much everything we've put it into. The ingredient occurs naturally in dairy and meat products that come from ruminants, like cows. So, unless you go vegan, there's no way to avoid it entirely. But most nutritionists (and the Department of Health and Human Services) aren't as worried about the naturally occurring kind. It's the trans fat that's made from pumping hydrogen into vegetable oil that even the Bush Agriculture Department says everyone should avoid. The kind that McDonald's pumps into its fries.
Today, most Americans get about 2.6 percent of their total calories per day from trans fat, according to the FDA. The new 2005 federal dietary guidelines advise Americans to "keep trans fatty acid consumption as low as possible." That's vague. But at a press conference announcing the new dietary regime in January, then Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy G. Thompson said 2 grams per day is probably the "upper limit" that an adult should aim for in their diet. Even a small order of McDonald's French fries has more than that.
Trans fat still lurks in all kinds of tasty goodies from packaged crackers, cookies and pastries to movie-theater popcorn in the form of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Processed-food companies are scrambling to get it out of their products before Jan. 1, 2006, when they'll have to list the number of grams of trans fat on their labels, just like saturated fats. The lengths and expense that they're going to achieve this -- and keep the taste and consistency that customers are used to in products like packaged cookies and donuts -- have been chronicled on the front page of the New York Times.
McDonald's is taking the trans fat issue on its triple chin: The fast food giant will pay $8.5 million to settle two lawsuits that argued that the Golden Arches misled the public about the amount of the fat in its foods. McDonald's announced it would remove the artery-clogging fat from its menu back in 2002 but then failed to do so. Apparently, it's not that easy to make McDonald's signature item -- the French fry -- without trans fat. The lawyer involved in the suits also organized the campaign to make the restaurants in his town -- Tiburon -- trans fat free. He famously sued Kraft about all the trans fat in Oreo cookies, a few years back, before withdrawing the suit, saying he'd made his point.
And as the jihad against trans fat spreads, health magazines are even creating shopping lists of treats that don't have dreaded stuff. So the great trans fat purge has turned into a marketing bonanza, because even some of the junkiest junk foods can boast that they don't have trans fat. In September 2004, Tostitos started sporting "0 grams of Trans Fat" on the front of the packaging, with Frito-Lay promising chips like Lay's, Ruffles, Doritos, Fritos and Cheetos would soon do the same.
That's one reason nutritionists and public-health advocates think that focusing too much on the worst fat in the American diet clouds the larger issue: getting people to eat less junk and more nutritious foods like vegetables and fruits. Simply removing trans fat from food products hardly makes them healthy. In many cases, they are still loaded with sugar, preservatives and calories. Just because Fritos or Doritos chips don't have trans fat doesn't mean a dietician will recommend shoveling them down with abandon.
"It's a joke to me," says Michele Simon, director of the Center for Informed Food Choices in Oakland, Calif. "As if taking the trans fat out of something makes it healthy. This is a typical food industry strategy. They turn it into a marketing gimmick. This is the problem with the focus on a single ingredient. The industry will just find some substitute."
One key issue is: What will replace trans fat? To keep the texture, taste and mouth-feel that consumers are used to in their cookies and snacks, some companies may just take out the trans fat and pack on the saturated fat. "We actually might be taking a step backward if food companies are taking out trans fat and substituting in twice as much or more saturated fat," says Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton, professor of nutrition at Penn State University, who served on the federal dietary guidelines advisory committee. "We've really done a lot in recent years getting people to decrease saturated fat, and I'd really hate to see the pendulum swing back there and have saturated fat increase."
But it's hard to see how that won't happen. "For companies to find some kind of reasonable substitute, it's either going to cost them, or they're going to have to put in more saturated fat," says Nestle from New York University.
One reason trans fat oil has been so attractive to companies has nothing to do with taste, consistency or the shelf-life it gives products. It's very cheap. Soybeans, which trans fat is often derived from, are a heavily government-subsidized commodity. In the '90s, the domestic soybean industry waged war on Malaysian palm oil, a major source of saturated fat. "They organized this huge campaign," Nestle says. "Everybody took the palm oil out of their foods." She thinks it would be "very ironic" if the campaign against trans fat brings it back.
I'd already done as much myself in the microcosm of my cupboard. When I stopped buying crackers that have trans fat, I stocked up on wheat crackers. It never occurred to me to check the saturated fat from the palm oil in those crackers, although I did note that they had a lot of calories.
