Misstropolis

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Forbidding Fat

by Rachael Moeller Gorman

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There’s nothing like the sizzle of sausage and peppers to trigger memories of a warm summer evening at the ballpark. If you’re planning a trip to the Green Monster this year, however, you’ll find your friendly Fenway food has changed – not the sausages, thank goodness, but the fry oil. No longer are trans fats – the nutrition villain-of-the-year – allowed. That means healthier (emphasis on the “-er”) French fries and chicken tenders.

Fenway isn’t the first establishment to focus on the fat. Legal Sea Foods eliminated it from its fried fish years ago and now only buys products that are trans fat-free, down to the crackers in the clam chowder. The Boston Public Health Commission sponsors a program called Boston BestBites that gives special table tents and window decals to restaurants that eschew the fat (among other healthy choices). And biggest of all, the New York City Board of Health voted last December to ban the fat outright in all its restaurants by July 2008, including the likes of McDonald’s and Burger King.

But is banning trans fats really necessary? Will it even help?

The best answer may be a recent study conducted right here at Harvard. Researchers have known for some time that trans fats are terrible for the heart – they raise bad LDL cholesterol, lower good HDL cholesterol, and increase heart-unhealthy inflammation in the body. Walter Willett at Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues wanted to quantify just how bad these fats are, so they examined an assortment of studies that looked at the effects of trans fats on the body. Their results: if industrially-produced trans fats were completely eliminated from the food supply, 72,000-228,000 heart attacks and other coronary problems would be averted each year in the US. That’s at least the population of Newton, Wellesley, and Brookline combined.

Proponents of the ban point out that trans fats are not a normal part of our diet – except for negligible amounts found naturally in meat, we created trans fats back in the early 1900s when companies began mechanically hardening vegetable oil. By mid-century, margarines made out of this partially hydrogenated vegetable oil became popular – they were cheap and had a long shelf life. By the 1970s, consumers chose margarine as a heart-healthy replacement (ironically) for the saturated fat in butter. Now, restaurants and fast food places love the stuff because multiple batches of fries and nuggets can be cooked in partially hydrogenated oils, and it also creates cookies that are perfectly crispy and long-lasting. Yet we now know that just 2-7g of trans fat per day puts you on the path to heart disease; that’s one doughnut, one serving of French fries, or one serving of microwave popcorn. Americans, on average, consume 6g per day.

The FDA believes trans fats are an increasingly important issue. Since January 2006, the FDA has forced manufacturers to list trans fat levels on all food labels (less than 0.5g can be listed as “0” grams trans fats). Partly as a result of the impending label requirement, Kraft removed the stuff from Oreos and Wheat Thins (among other products) and Frito-Lay chucked it from Fritos and Doritos. Fast food joints are following suit – Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, and Ruby Tuesday’s all plan to remove trans fats from their fry oil (or already have). Even the town of Brookline will be looking at a trans-fat ban in all its restaurants at its May 29th town meeting.

Still, banning trans fats doesn’t really make salty, saturated-fat-packed, over-processed foods that much healthier, and even foods that boast “no trans fats” may pose a problem: some manufacturers simply replace trans-fatty oils with unhealthy saturated fats. Check out both the trans fat and saturated fat levels on the label before buying a product; and stick to the perimeter of the supermarket to get the most bang for your nutritional buck.

In the end, you can be confident that if you buy fries during a warm summer evening at Fenway, your trans fat intake will be lower than if you ate the fries at McDonald’s. But they’re still full of salt. And that hot dog in your other hand is bursting with saturated fat. And the beer… But every once in awhile, we all have to splurge – especially while root, root, rooting for the home team.

Legal Sea Foods photo by Heath Robbins