Getting Americans to choose healthier foods will take more than adding a line about trans fat to nutrition labels.
A week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that packaged foods will have to list their trans-fat contents by January 2006, some consumers, interviewed in local supermarkets, said they'd never heard of trans fat. Inglewood resident Emmanuel Juarez said the term didn't even sound familiar. "I don't know anything about it," he said.
Consumers must learn not only to look for the new information, but to understand what it means for their health and how to choose healthier foods. But it's the manufacturers that could have the biggest impact on the choices we make.
The FDA estimates that the new line on packaged foods' nutrition facts panels will prevent 600 to 1,200 heart attacks a year, saving 250 to 500 lives annually by 2009.
That calculation is based, an FDA official said, not just on the number of people who use food labels, but on the rate at which the labeling change will spur manufacturers to reduce or remove trans fat from products currently on the market.
"Most people do not even pick up the package and look at the label" on packaged foods, said Gail Frank, professor of nutrition at Cal State Long Beach and spokesperson for the American Dietetic Assn. "Why do we think having a trans-fat listing is enough to make people drop a food item or put it back on the shelf?"
Studies have shown that people who do read food labels regularly tend to have low-fat diets. They also tend to be women, people under 35 years of age, and those with more than a high school education, according to a study conducted at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in 1999. In other words, many people who read the food labels are those least likely to need big dietary changes.
In recent years more than half a dozen studies have confirmed that trans fat, a type of unsaturated fat that acts like saturated fat, increases levels of artery-clogging LDL cholesterol in the blood. The fat, also known as partially hydrogenated oil, is produced when manufacturers add hydrogen to vegetable oils to make them solid and more durable. It's found in many cookies, crackers, snack foods and fried foods. It's also found naturally in red meats and dairy products containing fat.
