New York City to Food Industry: Drop Trans Fats

In August 2005, New York City's health department asked the city’s 24,000 food-service establishments to voluntarily eliminate trans fats from their kitchens. Despite offering advice on how to make the change, little progress was made. Having played nice, New York is now seeking to impose a ban on using trans fats in all city restaurants beginning in 2007.

Trans fats are artificial fats that are made when liquid vegetable oils are converted into solid fats through a chemical process called partial hydrogenation. Hydrogenated fats have been a boon to the food-service industry because they are relatively cheap, have a high melting point, are reusable and lend a number of pleasing qualities to foods, including creaminess, crunchiness, flakiness, and many other desirable characteristics relating to mouth feel and texture. That's the good news. The bad news is that trans fats are thought to be even worse for us than saturated fats. Trans fats not only raise bad (LDL) cholesterol, they also lower good (HDL) cholesterol. But that's not all: trans fats are linked to insulin resistance, inflammation, type-2 diabetes, and possibly cancer.

Although trans fats must be listed on nutrition labels, most of us visiting restaurants have little way of knowing whether the food we’re eating contains trans fats. Some restaurants, including McDonald’s, which has been under pressure for many years to find an alternative cooking oil for its fries, do have nutrition information available, but these are the exception. Some New York restaurants, including the Carnegie Deli, have been using alternative cooking oils for years, but others say they will have a hard time making the switch and replicating the texture and flavors of some of their foods. Tim Zagat, CEO of Zagat Survey, believes such a change is long overdue and easy for restaurants to comply with. And Walter Willett, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health, reckons that at least 500 deaths from heart disease could be prevented in New York City each year if all sources of trans fats were removed.

New Yorkers have until October 30th to offer public comment on the health department’s web site or in writing. If the proposal is passed, restaurants would have six months to switch to oils, shortening and spreads containing less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving. After 18 months, all other restaurant foods would need to comply.

More on Trans Fats

• What are Trans Fats?
• Good Fats, Bad Fats
• Trans Fats on Food Labels
• Quiz on Trans Fats