Eating for good health just got a whole lot easier now that food manufacture
Eating for good health just got a whole lot easier now that food manufacturers are required to list trans fats on nutrition labels.
Many manufacturers reformulated products to reduce or eliminate these fats, which are implicated in heart disease. Consequently, there have been some big changes since the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS) released its top 10 trans fat foods in its 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
There's no official recommended daily allowance (RDA) for trans fats, but eat just half a doughnut, and you've hit the 2-gram daily limit, according to Carlos Camargo, MD, DrPH, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and member of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. That's not hard to do when about 40% of products in your supermarket contain trans fats, and many restaurants and fast-food chains, which are not required to provide nutrition information, fry with partially hydrogenated oils.
WebMD can help you become a trans fat detective. It's not simply a matter of grabbing products with the alluring come-on: "no trans fats."
"Be aware that the FDA allows food manufacturers to label any product that has less than half a gram of trans fat per serving as zero," says Cindy Moore, MS, RD, director of nutrition therapy at The Cleveland Clinic. "You could be getting up to 0.49 grams of trans fat in a serving and not know it. It quickly adds up."
For example, the package of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter says "No Trans Fat," and the Nutrition Facts label lists the value for trans fats per serving as zero. Read on. In the ingredients list are the words "partially hydrogenated vegetable oils." "Partially hydrogenated" is the clue to hidden trans fats.
