Website Tells You Good Fat from Bad

A new web-based tool from the American Heart Association called My Fats Translator is designed to help eaters distinguish between good and bad fats in the foods they are thinking about eating.

With the recommended dietary guidelines of 25 to 35 percent of daily calories being fat and suggestions to limit saturated fat to 7 percent of calories, it makes it difficult for the average person to follow the recommendations without having a calculator around at meal time.

The new web site can crank out how many calories an individual should take in daily based on their age, gender, weight, height and physical activity level as well as specify how many grams of fat - saturated and trans fat - this person may have. The website then takes typical foods from fast food restaurants and does the breakdown of how those foods fit into an individual's caloric intake profile.

People will learn that trading in the deep dish pizza crust for thin crust, is better for their health, while ordering a regular hamburger instead of cheeseburger can cut calories and bad fats.

The American Heart Association is hoping that people will take away from the site that simple substitutions can lead to healthier choices without completely altering our lifestyles (which inherently includes fast food and eating out).

The irony is that the tool and entire initiative behind the tool was in part funded from a portion of the $8.5 million settlement from McDonald's which was sued in 2003 for telling the public that it hadn't switched to healthier oils to cook its fries.

The other point to pick on the subject of this website is that the main idea behind it, was to make it easier for people to decipher whether something they were about to eat, would be a good choice. The site supposedly would subtract the need for a calculator and other tools to decipher the healthiness of any given food. The fact of the matter is that, fast food in general is not healthy. We don't need a website to tell us that.

In fact, the substitution recommendations on pizza or hamburgers are all well and fine, but in reality if people learned to just eat fast food in moderation, they could have their deep dish pizza and eat it too.

What an incredible waste of money this website is when the $8.5 million settlement could have went to a much better cause like finding the cure for a disease or fighting homelessness or improving our school systems. To spend it on something that we have the power to change seems ridiculous - as ridiculous as blaming companies for our inability to stay away from fatty foods.