TwoBit Peak, from the 40th St Trailhead
First non-notable hike of the year
Are people duped by the “0g trans fat” line on nutrition labels? All of the foods I buy are labeled as having no trans fat, and yet, looking in my pantry this morning, I see in the ingredient list of the hot chocolate powder, hydrogenated coconut oil, and of the crispy taco shells, hydrogenated soybean oil.
The partial hydrogenation of oil leads to the creation of trans fats, so how can the nutrition labels say zero trans fat? That's because these foods have less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving—a small enough amount to be rounded down to 0g. Some foods advertise on their packaging “Zero trans fat!”—only to contradict themselves in the ingredient list.
This is a nice trick by food producers and government regulators. Most foods have less than 0.5g of trans fats and thus may claim “zero trans fat”—even Crisco All-Vegetable Shortening, which you might think would be the poster child for trans fat. Ingredients: soybean oil, fully hydrogenated palm oil, partially hydrogenated palm and soybean oils, mono and diglycerides, TBHQ and citric acid (antioxidants).
Food producers use hydrogenated fats in their products because doing so allows them to take an oil that's cheap and has a long shelf life—e.g., vegetable oil—and then chemically change that oil to stay solid at room temperature. This last property is key. Who wants to buy a cookie that's a greasy mess? Ditto, apparently, for crispy taco shells.
So trans fats are useful. And they're inappropriately labeled. A more meaningful measurement would be in milligrams, not grams—same as how cholesterol and sodium are labelled today. Indeed, suppose sodium were measured in grams instead of milligrams. Nearly every product in the grocery store would advertise itself as “Sodium free!” Potato chips, hummus, salted peanuts?—all sodium-free! Salt itself barely misses the cut-off for sodium-freeness, having 590mg of sodium per 1.5g serving.
