Restaurants slow to drop dishes
with trans fat: Health
March 19, 2005
For people trying to banish trans fat from their diets,
dining out can be a big problem.
Products free of trans fat are rapidly appearing in
supermarkets snack aisles, but the fried chicken and
french fries ordered in restaurants usually are cooked
in shortening or oil containing trans fat.
"Unfortunately, the restaurant industry has almost
become addicted to them because it's sort of the cheap
and easy thing to do," said Dr. Walter Willett,
a Harvard University nutrition expert. "There now
are alternatives that are available, and restaurants
just need to take their customers' health to heart."
The government started telling people in January to
eat as little trans fat as possible. Studies have linked
it to higher risk of heart attacks. It also has been
shown to raise bad cholesterol and, unlike saturated
fat, reduce good cholesterol.
To find trans fat, look for the word "hydrogenated"
in the list of ingredients on a food label. Hydrogenation
is the process of turning liquid vegetable oils into
hardened fats -- think shortening or margarine.
Harder fats give pie crust and other baked goods their
delectable texture. These fats also are durable. They
stand up to high temperatures and last long enough to
fry multiple batches of fries, chicken, fish and onion
rings.
Beginning next year, trans fat must be listed on food
labels, helping shoppers who have had to hunt through
the ingredients. The labeling requirement has driven
the development of trans fat-free cookies, crackers,
chips and other foods.
For restaurants, which provide one in every five meals
in the country, there is no such requirement. Restaurants
are only now beginning to take trans fat off their menus.
"They're in places where you wouldn't expect to
find them, like in oyster crackers. We went through
a ton of oyster crackers," said Roger Berkowitz,
president and chief executive of Legal Sea Foods.
An East Coast chain of 30 restaurants, Legal Sea Foods
has eliminated trans fat from its menu, switching to
a trans fat-free vegetable oil and finding a manufacturer
that precooks french fries without using trans fats.
Fries present one of the toughest challenges. They
usually arrive at restaurants blanched, or precooked,
in oil with trans fats. So even if a restaurant has
switched to a healthier oil, french fries can still
have trans fat. But manufacturers are starting to offer
trans fat-free fries.
The Ruby Tuesday's chain is asking its suppliers to
remove trans fat and has switched from hydrogenated
soybean oil to trans fat-free canola in its more than
700 restaurants, spokesman Perrin Anderson said.
Making the switch is not cheap. Yet it is not terribly
expensive, either, said Kelly Brintle, senior vice president
at food service supplier Ventura Foods of Brea, Calif.,
which sells a trans-fat free oil.
The switch probably adds a penny to the cost of an
individual order of french fries, Brintle said.
"It's a matter of us getting the operator out
of the mentality of expecting always just the lowest
cost," he said.
Some believe the government did not go far enough on
trans fat in the dietary guidelines made public last
month.
The Washington-based Center for Science and the Public
Interest has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration
to require restaurants to disclose their use of trans
fat.
Doctors and scientists who developed the recommendations
for the dietary guidelines set a specific trans fat
limit: People should consume 1 percent or less of their
calorie intake.
But when the Agriculture and Health and Human Services
departments issued the guidelines, they changed that
to keeping consumption "as low as possible."
"I think their feeling probably was that it would
be hard to do it right away. They want trans fat to
be dropped, but they want to give food companies, particularly
baked goods companies, time to switch this around, get
the level down below 1 percent," said Dr. Xavier
Pi-Sunyer, a members of the guidelines panel who directs
obesity research at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in
New York.
Until restaurants eliminate trans fat from their food,
another doctor on the panel offered these suggestions:
"Don't order deep-fried foods. Order things like
broiled fish, chicken breast, lean red meat," said
Dr. Penny Kris-Etherton, a nutritionist.
That's a tall order considering the public's tastes.
The fastest-growing restaurant food last year, according
to Harry Balzer of the consumer research firm NPD Group,
was fried chicken.
Source:www.keralanext.com
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