Trans Fats Get The Ax in New York Restaurants
from the NY Times, New York Bans Most Trans Fats in Restaurants
The New York City Board of Health voted yesterday to adopt the nation’s first major municipal ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, a move that would radically transform the way food is prepared in thousands of restaurants, from McDonald’s to fashionable bistros to Chinese take-outs.
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.
Restaurants will still have until next July 1 to eliminate oils, margarines and shortening from recipes that contain more than a half-gram of trans fat per serving. By July 1, 2008, they would have to remove all menu items that exceed the new limit, including bread, cakes, chips and salad dressings.
But under terms adopted yesterday, some foods will fall under the later deadline, including doughnuts, fritters, biscuits and deep fried items that the board said were particularly hard to prepare with a trans fat substitute.
Chicago is considering a similar prohibition that would affect restaurants with more than $20 million in annual sales.
from U.S. Food and Drug Administration:
Scientific evidence shows that consumption of saturated fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol raises low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol, levels, which increases the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, more than 12.5 million Americans have CHD, and more than 500,000 die each year. That makes CHD one of the leading causes of death in the United States.
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