Trans Fat Revolution: Turning Junk Food into Healthy, Nutritious Angel Food

Lately I've been noticing lots of food items with the claim "Zero Trans-fat" or "No trans-fat" on them. It seems like all the tasty, unhealthy foods have suddenly become nutritious and even good for you. Twinkies, chips and ice cream for all!

But today I learned that there's a dark side to the claims of "no Trans fat." My mom was looking at the ingredients of a kid's cereal and pointed out that it contained "partially-hydrogenated soybean oil." Then she saw on the front that it said there is "0g of trans fat", and she wondered out loud how it could have the partially hydrogenated oil and also have an absence of Trans-fat. She had learned before that anything with partially hydrogenated oil contains trans-fat, and now she doubted her memory.

So I said let's google it and see what's going on. I googled "trans fat" and "partially hydrogenated oil" and came up with a plethora of stuff to read. But I found some good authoritative websites with info about Trans-fat. It turns out that partially-hydrogenated foods do indeed have Trans fat in them.

So what was going on then? Well, the FDA has allowed the food companies to round their trans fat amount down to zero. Yes, instead of giving full disclosure, if there is less than 0.5 grams of Trans fat in one serving of the food, it's just the same as nothing, just insignificant digits. But this is significant - they are allowed to say it has zero grams of trans fat when it does indeed contain some Trans fat. You may be thinking, "0.5 grams is pretty much nothing, right?" Wrong - 0.5 grams is not a negligible amount, and when you multiply it by the number of servings(for the cereal it's 16 servings), then the amount of trans fat could be almost eight grams.

Also, what if the company decides to make the serving size smaller - after all, aren't we going to be reasonable with those potato chips? On the cereal I talked about, the serving size is listed as 3/4th of a cup. Not one cup of cereal, but 3/4 of a cup. Why, those guys are encouraging us to eat smaller portion sizes! How kind of them, such noble spirits.

By telling the food manufacturers they could round down any amount less than 0.5 grams, they are giving the food companies the green light to lie. If the item says "0 grams of trans fat", but each serving contains 0.48 grams of Trans fat, then something is wrong. Zero isn't "like almost nothing you know", it's zilch, nothing. Using the word zero so loosely is similar to abusing the word "free" like advertisers often do.

And we're talking about Trans fat, which is harmful stuff, and does two bad deeds - it raises your LDL(low-density lipoprotein, or bad protein) cholesterol and lowers your HDL(high-density lipoprotein, or good protein that reduces your cholesterol). How do we know then whether the amount of Trans fat is 0.49 grams per serving or 0.02 grams per serving? There's a big difference between those kinds of numbers, and we're being left in the dark about how much Trans-fat is inside the food. It's not just packaged foods that have exploited this law. Fast-food companies have capitalized on the recent Trans fat rule also. And history has shown that large corporations often are more motivated by profits than consumer health.

So instead of getting trans-parency about the Trans fat, we're now getting a misleading picture. Overall, in order to understand whether the food you're buying is healthy or not, you're best bet is to read the first few ingredients and pay attention to words like "partially-hydrogenated" or "processed" or "refined", which signal unhealthy ingredients.

Source:

"Trans fat: Avoid this cholesterol double whammy - MayoClinic.com." MayoClinic.com 
Shin, Annys and Rosenwald, Michael. "Hold the Trans Fats: Area Eateries Try Alternate Oils." WashingtonPost.com.