“New York City has set a national standard,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, who predicted that other communities would follow suit.
Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.
While the trans fat regulation captured the most attention, the Board of Health approved a separate measure — also the first of its kind in the country — requiring some restaurants, mostly fast food outlets, to prominently display the caloric content of each menu item on menu boards or near cash registers.
Health officials said displaying calorie counts was meant to address what is widely regarded as a nationwide epidemic of obesity.
I have no great love for the fast food industry, but this oversimplification of setting all the blame for increasing obesity in this country at the feet of the fast food industry is ridiculous. There may be a case to be made that fast food is a significant cause of childhood obesity, and arguably even obesity in low income communities. There's definitely a case to be made that fast food isn't very fast, and it's only arguably food. And while trans fats are unquestionably bad for you, singling out restaurants is hardly going to be a drop in the bucket in the amount of trans fats Americans eat.
Looked at the label on a loaf of bread lately? Or a box of crackers or cookies? Or a frozen dinner? Everything you see has "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil." It's nearly impossible to do, unless you stay away from processed foods, as I try mightily to do. And bans on trans fats do nothing to address what may be an even bigger culprit in obesity, and certainly in the growth of diabetes in this country: high fructose corn syrup. Whatever doesn't have trans fats is loaded with high fructose corn syrup. The very NAME makes it sound benign -- hey, it's fructose! That comes from fruit! So it's like eating fruit, isn't it? WRONG. HFCS may be the ultimate (other than Quorn) of Frankenfood:
First, cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called polysaccharides. Alpha-amylase is industrially produced by a bacterium, usually Bacillus sp. It is purified and then shipped to HFCS manufacturers.
Next, an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose. Unlike alpha-amylase, glucoamylase is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat where one would likely see little balls of Aspergillus floating on the top.
The third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, is very expensive. It converts glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose with some other sugars mixed in. While alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry, pricey glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it. Inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are used only once, glucose-isomerase is reused until it loses most of its activity.
There are two more steps involved. First is a liquid chromatography step that takes the mixture to 90 percent fructose. Finally, this is back-blended with the original mixture to yield a final concentration of about 55 percent fructose--what the industry calls high fructose corn syrup.
Yum!
You think trans-fats are in everything? Try looking for foods without this glop in it. I recently purchased a package of Pepperidge Farm 100% whole wheat hamburger rolls. Got them home, and sure enough, there it was: high fructose corn syrup. Buy a package of whole wheat hamburger rolls at Trader Joe's, and here's what you get:
100% stone ground whole wheat flour, water, barley malt, wheat gluten, yest, gold pressed corn oil, sea salt, cultured wheat flour, soy lecithin, sesame seeds when used
...and they taste almost the same. Like your bread with a little sweetness? Try Milton's 100% Whole Wheat bread, also sold at Trader Joe's:
Whole wheat flour, water, honey, vital wheat gluten, yeast. Contains 2% of less of the following: oat fiber, salt, calcium sulfate, distilled vinegar, soybean oil, wheat bran, cultured wheat flour, ascorbic acid, enzymes.
And both of these bread products taste just as good as the name-brand crap with the high fructose corn syrup.
Under the new rules, some restaurants are required to post calorie counts, but only those that have already posted calorie information elsewhere. This is obviously designed to target the fast food industry, which means places like Carmine's, the pricey NYC chain famous for portions big enough to feed an entire Sicilian village, are off the hook.
The problem with all of these well-intentioned drives to fight obesity is that they insist that there's some one-size-fits-all, magic bullet that will end the obesity problem in this country. In fact, there are many causes for obesity, as I can well attest. Some of it is ignorance. Some of it is the "When the fuck do I have time to devote an hour to working out? factor. Some of it is advertising, which tells us "Eat this, but don't you dare get fat." One of them is mass-manufactured food, made with God-Knows-What, available 24 by 7. I think Marc Maron summed up the problem here:
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