Fw: Restaurants Prepare for Big Switch: No Trans Fat ... NY Times June 21, 2008

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NY Times June 21, 2008

Restaurants Prepare for Big Switch: No Trans Fat

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Say you are given a choice of two cookies. One is made with butter, the other with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Both have the same amount of calories from fat. Which do you choose?

If you picked the butter cookie, you can keep eating. But the one made with P.H.V.O., as it is known in the trade, is forbidden come July 1, when the final stage of the New York City health department’s ban of artificial (but not naturally occurring) trans fat in restaurant food goes into effect.

Such is the complicated — some say culturally biased — world of trans fat regulation. Old-fashioned Crisco has been outlawed in the interest of reducing heart disease because of its so-called industrial fat content (though there is a new replacement on the market), but many of the ingredients your grandmother warned you about — including butter, palm oil and lard — are back in style and completely legal.

New York City has officially embraced the mantra that natural is better, forcing restaurants and other commercial food purveyors to add baked goods to fried foods among those that must be free of trans fat or risk fines up to $2,000.

To calm the fears of restaurateurs that their business may suffer, city officials have set up a veritable trans fat industrial complex in the 18 months since the ban was announced.

They created a Trans Fat Help Center , complete with telephone hotline and Web site, notransfatnyc.org, and hired a former senior editor for Martha Living Omnimedia, Stanley, to run it. Ms. Stanley, who is paid through a three-year $650,000 contract with the hospitality management school at the Brooklyn-based New York City College of Technology, has conducted a series of workshops for food preparers on how to adapt.

The city’s health department has also enlisted the American Institute of Baking, based in Kansas , to perfect trans fat-free bulk recipes for chewy chocolate cookies (trans fat-free shortenings tended to make the cookies too crispy), durable pie crust and other comfort foods, to prove to skeptics that the textures and “mouth feel” they love can be accomplished without trans fats. The institute tested oils, shortenings and margarines from six manufacturers to analyze the color, crumb, mouth feel and the way they cut and taste in recipes for pie crusts, croissants, Danish, layer cakes, pound cakes, cookies and sweet buns, until Ms. Stanley was satisfied that the results would convince restaurants that they could make the transition.

Since New York announced its trans fat ban, officials from about a dozen other cities, including Boston , Philadelphia and Seattle , have called the Trans Fat Help Center for advice in implementing their own bans.

Ms. Stanley, a trim, disarmingly frank woman in her 40s with a culinary degree and a pedagogic streak, is a tireless campaigner for her cause and has made a habit of dropping into restaurants as she travels around the city.

One recent day, after going to a nearby gym to work out, she dropped in on and Jackie Haye, owners of Christie’s Jamaican Patties, a storefront shop in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Mr. Haye said that when he received a health department bulletin about eight months ago outlining the impending ban and attendant penalties, he considered reverting to lard but was wary, because lard “has high cholesterol, so we try not to mess with it.”

Since he received the bulletin, Mr. Haye, 47, has converted his Jamaican beef patty dough, coco bread, rock cake and other recipes he inherited from his uncle — who began the business 40 years ago — from BBS shortening (it’s partially hydrogenated) to a trans fat-free shortening sold by Admiration Foods, which he found at Restaurant Depot, a popular food service supply company. He said in a recent interview that the transition has been easier than he expected: customers seem not to have noticed any difference.

Executives at the city’s bigger bakeries and chains have also gotten to know Ms. Stanley personally. Stuart Zaro, president of Zaro’s New York Bakery, described her as a kind of kitchen psychotherapist to whom he could express a few good-natured gripes.

He recalls complaining to her about what he estimates as a 20 percent increase in cost to bake without trans fats, as well as the clerical work involved in documenting his company’s conversion to the holy grail of trans fat-free baking.

Bakeries like his must now fill out “spec sheets” for each recipe, listing ingredients by weight from heaviest to lightest, along with the trans-fat content, for, say, German chocolate cake. Small amounts of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, shortening or margarine, less than half a gram per serving, are permitted.

The ingredient lists are for city inspectors, not the public. For a bakery that makes as many items as Zaro’s, “it’s going to be like the size of ‘War and Peace,’ ” Mr. Zaro said.

Mr. Zaro said the toughest recipe to adapt to the new regime had been chocolate chip cookies, which were too hard at first, but “we got it done and it’s done.”

Another chain, Panera Bread, found that making crispy strudel without trans fat was so hard they just took it off the menu, said , the company’s chief concept officer.

Mr. Zaro said that his bakers had always used butter as well as shortening and margarine in products like croissants, muffins, cakes and cupcakes, and that when they removed trans fat they might have added a bit more butter.

“You can pick your poison, I guess that’s what it comes down to, although butter tastes so good,” he said, good humoredly.

Ms. Stanley acknowledged that many of the city’s most upscale bakeries used lots of butter, which carries its own hazards. “But they’re French!” she said, playfully.

The city’s embrace of butter and other natural but highly saturated fats, like palm oil, is among the most controversial aspects of the ban. There have been some complaints about palm oil, Ms. Stanley said, because while trans fat retains its plasticity at a variety of temperatures, palm oil shortening can become either too hard at cold temperatures or too soft and even runny at warm ones.

“Down the line, we’re going to see more shortening on the market that does not have that problem,” she predicted.

Two of the alternatives recommended on the city health department’s trans fat Web site — Clear Valley All Purpose Shortening and Crisco All-Vegetable Shortening — have 25 percent saturated fat. And they are at the low end of the scale. The city also lists several palm-oil based products, like Superb All Purpose Palm Shortening and Ventura Pastry Margarine, that contain 50 percent or more saturated fat (pure butter is 64 percent saturated fat).

The goal of manufacturers has been to keep the saturated fat levels equal to or lower than the combined saturated and trans fat level in the artificial products they are intended to replace, according to Earl, senior director for nutrition policy with the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

City officials defend the switch. Dr. Angell, director of the city’s cardiovascular disease prevention and control program, said it would be highly impractical for the city to try to regulate naturally occurring saturated fats. Besides, she said, “We act on the evidence that we have, and the evidence is that gram for gram, trans fat is worse for you than saturated fat.”

Others say the scientific evidence is less than clear-cut, though.

Dr. H. Eckel, a professor of medicine who specializes in cardiology and endocrinology at the University of Colorado in Denver, said he was concerned that New Yorkers might feel so virtuous eating trans fat-free foods that they would overlook the dangers of saturated fats, which also contribute to obesity and heart disease.

Dr. Eckel hailed New York ’s efforts to reduce trans fat but said the American Heart Association, of which he is a former president, “is concerned about substituting trans fats with shortenings that are high in saturated fat.”

“It’s not a matter of which is better or which is worse,” he explained. “The American Heart Association is concerned with both types of fats.”

Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard, said last week that some research suggested that trans fats may change the metabolism of fat cells, making people put on more dangerous abdominal weight. Dr. Mozaffarian said that given a choice between a cookie made with butter and one made with artificial trans fats, he, like New York ’s health department, would take the butter.

“I may be a rogue cardiologist for saying that, but I think the science supports it,” he said. “That being said, I’d rather have vegetable oils than butter. That shouldn’t be missed, either.”

During a recent lecture for food preparers, Ms. Stanley echoed Dr. Mozaffarian, telling her audience of day-care providers that saturated fat was better than artificial trans fat because it is natural. The point was not lost on one participant, who asked whether coconut oil was an acceptable substitute.

“It’s 90 percent saturated fat,” Ms. Stanley said, cringing.

The woman was unfazed. “We use it in rice and peas in the Caribbean ,” she said. “I love it.”

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