This is getting ridiculous:
Matthew Reich is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He prefers butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds the public health effort to get artificial trans fat out of food.
But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat hysteria, Mr. Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to substitute processed fats like palm oil and margarine for good old-fashioned butter because of the small amounts of natural trans fat butter contains.
Some researchers believe that the trans fat that occurs naturally in butter, meat, milk and cheese might actually be healthy. But to satisfy companies that want to call their foods completely free of trans fats, bakers like Mr. Reich are altering serving sizes, cutting back on butter and in some cases using ingredients like trans fat-free margarine.
There's some serious nutritional science demonstrating that artificial trans fats are bad ingredients. They also aren't particularly tasty, and are used to keep the fat in processed foods from congealing into a greasy mess. But natural trans fats? They are a fundamental trace element in every good animal fat, from lard to butter to cheese. Ban trans fats completely and most of our most delectable treats become illegal. (Life without bacon or brie is a life with a little less pleasure in it.)
But there's a sad moral in the anti trans fat fad. Even when the science is solid, the needs of the food industry end up perverting the data. The desire to be "trans-fat free" - to emblazon a superficial label on the box of food so that consumers feel better about their purchase - leads to all sorts of detrimental decisions. The science is run through a marketing mill, and nobody benefits from that.
Starbucks, which sells millions of baked goods a day at its 8,700 United States stores, has asked all of the bakers who provide its pastries to eliminate any trace of trans fat by the end of the year. The change has already happened in Washington and Oregon. California bakers are reworking recipes this month to try to meet a Starbucks deadline.
"For us, it's easier for the customer to walk in and see zero grams trans fat than zero grams artificially created trans fat," said Brandon Borman, a company spokesman.
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Perhaps naturally occurring trans fats are just as unhealthy as artificial ones? Regardless, fats in general aren't exactly nutritious in the quantities Americans consume them; the net effect of this trend can't be too bad for public health.
Seems to me we've been well into ridiculous territory for some time now.
Are any of us getting any thinner? Has the % of overweight individuals in the U.S. drastically reduced in the past few years? I truly don't think so. Why can't the common consumer just see that if an item has the need to say "No trans fat", it just shouldn't be eaten or it should be consumed in very low quantities? Forget trans fats, just include a scale with each purchase of Chips a hoy, that might do our society better.