With all the talk about trans fat recently, I did some internet searching to find some interesting sites that might have something to contribute to the topic.

I came across BanTransFats.com

This is a non-profit organization in California dedicated to, well, the web site name is self-explanatory.

From this site—along with confirmation from the American Heart Association— I learned that I have been a little bit too proud of myself for eating foods with no trans fat, since foods that contain the label “zero trans fat” can still, in fact, contain trans fat. Indeed, labels can read “zero trans fat” as long as the item contains less than 0.5 grams of the most reviled substance (at least for now) in the food we eat.

But, as BanTransFats notes, if you eat many servings of a “zero trans fat” food that actually contains, say, .4 grams of trans fat per serving, well, before you know it, you’ve eaten quite a bit of the stuff.

So, looking at labels isn’t enough—you really have to read ingredient lists as well, and if you see “partially-hydrogenated oil” on the list, well, you’re in trouble from a trans fat perspective.

I can’t see any justification for having trans fat in food any more, so I’m glad NYC is banning it, and Boston is thinking of doing the same.

But I’m also thinking about this: according to reports, (see article) people eat four times as much saturated fat as they do trans fat.

Can public health departments, non-profits, etc., do to saturated fat what they have recently done to trans fat? If we’re eating 4x as much of it…