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A Disappearing Act: Harmful Trans Fats Vanish From Snacks, Lurk in Fast Food; Health Group Sets Limits

Posted on: Sunday, 25 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Barbara Feder Ostrov, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Jun. 25--Whether you're partial to Oreos, Twinkies or other packaged foods, you'd be hard-pressed these days to find any that contain trans fats, the notoriously artery-clogging fats long demonized by the food police.

But while trans fats are increasingly hard to find on supermarket shelves, they still reign in fast foods and some restaurant dishes.

That's why, for the first time, a leading health group has put a target number on trans fat consumption: The American Heart Association released guidelines last week that advise people to limit trans fats to 1 percent of their daily calories. That's about two grams in a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.

It's easy enough to hit the target if you stick to fresh, unprocessed foods -- but a lot harder if junk food is what you crave.

Jack in the Box's bacon cheddar cheese wedges? Twelve grams of trans fat. Plain glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut? Four grams. Heavily frosted German chocolate cake from the local Safeway? Who knows? There's no nutritional label on the cake, but the partially hydrogenated oils listed among the ingredients suggest that trans fats are indeed present.

"I wouldn't be terribly hopeful that a lot of fast-food restaurants have replaced trans fats," said Joanne Ikeda, a University of California-Berkeley nutrition education specialist and founding co-director of the Center for Weight and Health. "Everybody's wondering how to do it."

A series of recent developments have thrust trans fats back into public view:

Kentucky Fried Chicken was slapped with a lawsuit demanding that it rid its menu of trans fats, or at least inform consumers about them. (Starbucks is next, says the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which filed the suit.)

Earlier this month, Wendy's announced that it would eliminate trans fats -- something that has stymied some other fast-food chains.

The Panera chain of restaurant-bakeries has sworn off trans fats, but McDonald's, Jack in the Box and Burger King are still searching for ways to ditch them while maintaining the tastiness of their french fries and other foods.

However, a trip last week to a San Jose Safeway found only a few products that still contain trans fats, including Hostess fruit pies, Gamesa vanilla sugar wafers and Betty Crocker Rich and Creamy canned white frosting.

Trans fats get their bad reputation from their ability to raise levels of so-called bad cholesterol. Calorie for calorie, trans fats appear to increase heart disease risk more than any other nutrient, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even small amounts can be harmful: The study's authors reported adverse health effects in people who ate a mere two to seven grams of trans fats a day. The Food and Drug Administration says Americans typically eat about 5.8 grams of trans fats per day -- nearly three times what the new guidelines allow.

Trans fats have long been used in vegetable shortenings, some margarines, crackers and cookies, snack foods and fried foods. They're created when manufacturers add hydrogen to vegetable oil to create partially hydrogenated oils, which increase a food's shelf life and make it taste creamier. Small amounts of trans fat occur naturally in some meat and dairy products, but health experts are far more worried about the trans fats Americans ingest from the $550 billon-a-year processed-food industry.

When federal regulations required listing trans fats on nutrition labels starting Jan. 1, 2006, manufacturers hustled to eliminate trans fats from thousands of products ranging from cake mix to frozen pizza.

Nutritionists warn, however, that products listing no trans fats on the label could have up to 0.49 grams per serving, because the FDA labeling guidelines don't require manufacturers to list less than half a gram.

Those tiny amounts can add up.

"I tell my cardiac patients that they should not ever eat anything that comes out of a vending machine," said Dr. Stanley Rockson, chief of consultative cardiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

So what are food makers using instead? Kraft is using an oil made from genetically engineered soybeans in some of its foods, according to food-industry consultant Kantha Shelke. Some companies are using more-expensive peanut, sunflower and corn oils for frying potato chips and other snacks. Bakers are using fully, rather than partially, hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Still other food makers are experimenting with palm oil and other tropical oils.

Which gives New York University nutrition expert and food industry critic Marion Nestle a good laugh about the irony of it all. Commercial bakers once used lard and butter in their products but switched to tropical oils because they were seen as healthier. Then trans fats were touted as an even healthier -- and cheaper -- alternative. Now, medical researchers know better.

"There was this huge effort in the 1980s and early 1990s to get those oils out of the food supply," said Nestle, an outspoken critic of the food industry. "Now they're back."

While many of the new options contain a lot of saturated fat, which is also bad for the heart, they're still better than trans fats, company representatives say.

The recent attention to trans fats worries Nestle and other nutrition experts, who fear that people will focus on trans fats rather than reducing total fat in their diet. The American Heart Association guidelines advise consumers to get less than 7 percent of their calories from saturated fat, down from the previous recommendation of less than 10 percent. That's hard to do if you eat meat or even a moderate amount of processed food.

Last week, Caroline Stoner, 66, was buying low-fat cottage cheese, melons and Mother's cookies at a San Jose supermarket. She tries to eat whole-wheat sandwiches for lunch and a good amount of fruit, but she has a weakness for the beef tacos from Jack in the Box (1 gram trans fat).

"If you watch and look and read, it's easy to pay attention to trans fats," Stoner said. "The question is, will people do it?"

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IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

More information on the new American Heart Association diet and lifestyle guidelines is available at www.americanheart.org.

Contact Barbara Feder Ostrov at bfeder@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5064.

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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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