Are trans fat rules needed?
As knowledgable consumers, we should decide what we eat.
By Connie Holt
The Pennsylvania Department of Health has decided that the issue of trans fat in the foods we eat in restaurants needs to be studied, presumably with an eye toward legislation, and that a task force will be assembled to do the studying.
As a hospitality educator, I was relieved to note that someone from the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association will be on the new task force so that the voice of our wonderful state restaurant industry will be represented. After all, if this task force recommends some sort of government action to fight trans fat, the restaurateurs will be the ones responsible for carrying out the government mandates. But I wonder whether any government mandates are needed at all, given the changes that have occurred since trans fats were identified as a health risk.
We have known for some time now that both saturated fats and trans fats increase the risk of heart disease. Registered dietitians like me have long urged individuals to keep their intake of saturated fats below 10 percent of total calories. Currently, saturated fat represents about 12 percent of Americans' total calorie intake, and trans fats represent about 2.6 percent of the total.
How did trans fats get into our foods in the first place? A decade or more ago, consumers demanded foods low in saturated fat. So food companies began replacing saturated fats - butter, coconut and palm oils - with a specially formulated, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil that functioned like a saturated fat. Consumers could continue to eat their favorite snack foods and feel good that they were avoiding the bad fats.
Or so they thought. While consumers lost some flavor as a result, available evidence indicates that they didn't lose weight or lower the incidence of heart disease.
All we are doing now is fixing the problem created by our efforts to fix another problem. Before we blame this on the food processors, it's worth noting that the food industry keeps close track of customer preferences and goes to extraordinary lengths to give consumers what they want. We need only look at food products from snack foods to hydrogenated baking fats to see that trans fats are clearly on their way out of our food supply. Consumer advocate groups and education led the way, not government action.
In that case, why force restaurants to do something that the market is now taking care of? Small amounts of trans fats are found naturally in some foods, such as butter, so banning them all would require bake shops to stop using butter!
Since we who care about how much fat we eat are already changing our habits based on the latest knowledge, shouldn't we be allowed to make the decision to eat a croissant made with real butter or a crème puff made with real cream, knowing full well what we are putting into our mouths? Or does the government get to tell us that unless we make these things ourselves, we cannot? Does anyone really think that banning trans fats will cause consumers to eat less total fat?