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Trans fats: Infamous but not the only villain

Yes, they're bad for heart health, but nutritionists say focusing on them could distract from the real devil: Our diets

Artery-clogging trans fats are the villain of the moment in the enduring story of America's love affair with food.

New York and Philadelphia have moved to ban trans fats from restaurant foods, forcing chefs to find alternatives to the partially hydrogenated oils that have kept french fries tasty and pastries firm.

Big food companies are squeezing trans fats out of products from Oreos to Cheetos and rushing to find palatable substitute oils. Even Crisco has been reformulated so it's trans-fat free. Fast-food chains such as Wendy's and McDonald's have scrambled to figure out ways to cook fries without trans fats.

Now, some nutrition and health analysts say the preoccupation with trans fats has gone too far.

They say that in some cases, trans fats simply are being replaced with other unhealthful oils. And at a time when 66% of adults in the USA are overweight or obese, the analysts say the nation's fixation with trans fats is drawing attention away from other important reasons Americans' diets are so bad for their hearts: They continue to consume too many calories, too much junk food and not enough fruits and vegetables.

"It is important to remind ourselves that changing oils and removing trans fat does not magically turn a deep-fried food into a health food," says Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian at Northwestern Memorial Wellness Institute in Chicago and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

Robert Eckel, a former president of the American Heart Association, says that "getting rid of trans fats is important" because strong evidence indicates they contribute to higher levels of harmful cholesterol and heart disease. But, he says, "the idea that this is the most harmful (type of) fat is a matter of debate."

Some companies and restaurants have switched from partially hydrogenated oils to others — such as palm oil and coconut oil — that make the resulting products only marginally healthier. Palm and coconut oils are high in saturated fat, which contributes to heart disease and has been shown to raise the level of LDL cholesterol (that's the bad kind) in the blood.

"The American Heart Association does not consider it acceptable to substitute saturated fat for trans fats" in food products and restaurant foods, Eckel says.

Trans fats occur naturally in foods such as milk and beef. In 1897, scientists began creating such fats by adding hydrogen molecules to vegetable oils, creating stable oils that help foods stay firm and have a longer shelf life. Today, trans fats account for less than 2.6% of the calories in Americans' diets. But saturated (animal) fats make up about 12%.

Trans fats have been "overemphasized when you consider the big picture," says Shelley Goldberg of the International Food Information Council, an education group supported by the food, beverage and agricultural industries.

"My concern as a registered dietitian is that with all this focus on trans fats, there's not enough focus on an overall healthful diet, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, as well as fish and vegetable oils."

Trans fats deserve the attention they're getting as menaces to public health, analysts say.

Consumer advocates such as Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest say trans fats are so bad that the government should order them extracted from the food supply.

"This is the most harmful fat there is," Jacobson says.

Trans fats are "a metabolic poison that has no place in human diets," says Walter Willett, head of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and the nation's leading researcher on the subject. They "should be eliminated as quickly as possible."

Willett and other researchers have linked trans fats to heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity and other health problems.

Trans fats weren't always viewed so negatively.

In the 1980s, many food companies and restaurants began using trans fats instead of lard and beef tallow, which are high in saturated fat, because of reports that saturated fat raised levels of LDL cholesterol. At the time, trans fats were "considered a better choice for heart health," Goldberg says.

Since then, several studies have indicated that trans fats not only raise LDL cholesterol, but they also may lower HDL (good) cholesterol.

Other research has shown that total cholesterol can be lowered when trans fats and saturated fats are replaced with oils that are high in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, such as canola, corn, soybean, sunflower and olive oils. So during the past decade, some food companies, fast-food chains and restaurants have switched to those types of oils or mixtures of them.

However, many restaurants and major food companies — such as Kraft, the maker of Oreo cookies — have found that it's difficult to replace trans fats in baked goods such as muffins, croissants, cakes and cookies.

The partially hydrogenated oils give baked goods firmness and preservative qualities that are difficult to mimic with other fat alternatives, says Robert Reeves, president of the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils, a trade group based in Washington, D.C.

Jacobson says some food companies that make bakery goods, packaged cookies and crackers are replacing trans fats with palm oil.

Other companies, he says, are using mixtures of palm oil and cottonseed oil, or even butter. In some cases, the result is a food that is only slightly better for the consumer than one that includes trans fats.

But, Jacobson says, "whatever oil you replace (trans fats) with is an improvement — either a great improvement or a modest improvement."

Kraft has reformulated its recipes to remove or reduce trans fats in more than 650 products, spokeswoman Elisabeth Wenner says. "It was not simply swapping out one oil for another," she says. "In some cases, it was inventing proprietary blends of oils."

The most challenging products have been sandwich cookies such as Oreos, because both the cookie and its filling had to be reformulated, Wenner says. She says there were 200 trials done on Oreos.

For most products, Kraft found it could use relatively healthier oils. But "for a few reformulations, the saturated fat did increase slightly," Wenner says.

Kraft will not discuss its food formulas in detail. But according to an analysis by the public interest center, the change in the recipe for Oreos meant this:

•Original Oreos: 7 grams of total fat in a serving (about three cookies), including 2.5 grams of trans fat and 1.5 grams of saturated fat.

•New Oreos: 7 grams of total fat in a serving, with no trans fat and 2 grams of saturated fat.

Bonnie Liebman, a nutritionist with the public interest science center, has studied the move away from trans fats in packaged, processed foods.

She has found that most frozen breaded fish and chicken, salty snacks and tub margarines have been changed and now have little or no trans fats. Other foods such as frostings, croissants and stick margarines still have trans fats.

"The good news is that the total bad fat (saturated and trans fat) is either going down or staying the same," Liebman says. "In theory, we'd like to see all companies switch to non-hydrogenated oils such as canola and soybean, but apparently it's not possible in some foods."

Reeves says the makers of various oils continue to try to come up with new oils that have the properties that make trans fats useful to the food industry.

For Kraft and many other businesses, switching to different oils has taken time and research:

•McDonald's, the nation's largest restaurant chain and the world's biggest seller of french fries, says it searched for a trans-fat-free oil for four years. It tested 18 varieties of oils in an effort to make sure the change didn't affect the taste of its fries and other foods.

The company said last month that it's replacing its partially hydrogenated soybean oil with a trans-fat-free frying oil made from canola, corn and soybean oils. The amount of healthier oils in McDonald's products will increase, but the overall fat content won't change.

•Legal Sea Foods, which has 32 restaurants in eight states on the East Coast, switched from frying fish in partially hydrogenated oils to canola oil about seven years ago and found that customers liked the taste better, company owner Roger Berkowitz says.

•In 2003, Frito-Lay stopped frying Cheetos, Tostitos and Doritos in partially hydrogenated oil and switched to corn oil, which the company was using for Fritos. There was much research on what substitute would preserve the taste and other properties of the chips, says Charles Nicolas, a spokesman for the company. The overall fat content of Frito-Lay's products didn't change.

Although many big companies have made the switch from trans fats, Jacobson says, "there are thousands of smaller companies still using partially hydrogenated oils."

The Food and Drug Administration continues to categorize trans fats as "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS), a special grouping for chemicals or substances added to food that are considered acceptable by experts.

That status is "crazy at a time when partially hydrogenated oil is generally recognized as dangerous," Jacobson says. He has petitioned the agency to remove trans fats' "safe" status.

Barbara Schneeman, head of the FDA's office of nutrition, labeling and dietary supplements, says Jacobson's "petition is under review and the agency is evaluating its scientific merits."

She says the FDA "has taken a major step" by requiring the listing of trans fats in nutrition information on food containers.

"We are looking at additional steps regarding claims for trans fats," Schneeman says.

In the meantime, "consumers can't look at trans fat by itself. They have to look at trans fat, saturated fat and cholesterol for reducing cardiovascular disease," she says. "All of that information is available through the nutrition facts label."

Changes are taking time.

"Our industry is moving away from trans fats," says Sheila Weiss of the National Restaurant Association, a trade organization. "But we want to make sure we are moving toward a healthy alternative and not just getting a quick fix."

Goldberg worries that "if we make these changes too quickly, we may put something else in that we don't know the long-term effects of, and it might be worse."