Food Makers and Chain Restaurants Improving Product Quality
According to research recently conducted by Harvard’s Medical School and School of Public Health in collaboration with the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), food manufacturers and chain restaurants have responded to trans fat restrictions and bans by improving the quality of the foods rather than simply reverting to the use of saturated fats. Dariush Mozaffarian, Michael Jacobson & Julie Greenstein, “Correspondence: Food Reformulations to Reduce Trans Fatty Acids,” The New England Journal of Medicine, May 27, 2010. The authors state that they “identified 83 reformulated products (58 supermarket foods and 25 restaurant foods),” and studying product labels, they found that trans fats and saturated fats were reduced in 90 percent of the supermarket products and 96 percent of the restaurant products.
In a statement about the research, CSPI’s executive director said, “This paper demonstrates that the U.S. food industry has been generally responsible in replacing partially hydrogenated oils with more healthful oils. That should pave the way for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to eliminate partially hydrogenated oils from the food supply. The agency could do that quite easily by stating that it no longer considers partially hydrogenated oil to be ‘generally recognized as safe,’ and give companies a year or two to switch to healthier oils.” See CSPI Press Release, May 26, 2010.
