INCORRECT FATS

The "trans fat" panic is aiming at the wrong target

Trans fats. The term sends shudders down the spine. The fats show up in the worst foods - pies, doughnuts, cookies, chips. Some consumer groups call for them to be banned altogether. And on Wednesday, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the New York City health commissioner, comparing trans fats to toxic substances like asbestos or lead, asked restaurants to stop serving foods that contained them. New York City "deserves a medal," said Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group that has warned against trans fats. "The evidence really indicates that there is nothing worse," he added. "Switching to butter, palm oil, anything else would be an improvement."

That, however, is not exactly the view of most scientists who have examined the data. The National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and the Food and Drug Administration have all come to the same conclusion: Trans fats are on a par with saturated fats, like butter or lard. Both increase cholesterol levels and most people would be better off if they ate less of all of them. Period. "I call it the panic du jour," said Dr. David Kritchevsky of the trans fat fears. Dr. Kritchevsky is a dietary fat and cholesterol researcher at the Wistar Institute, an independent nonprofit research center in Philadelphia. Trans fat, he added, "is an easy whipping boy."

It is also an unsurprising one, said Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies people's psychological relationships with the food they eat. While trans fat occurs naturally in foods like milk and meats, most trans fat in processed foods was created by chemically altering oils like corn oil, turning them into fats that add texture and stability. That means most trans fat is artificial, which causes many people to recoil. "Food is one of the areas where people think to leave it alone is better," Professor Rozin says.

For heart disease researchers, however, the question is not whether a food is natural but whether eating it increases the risk of heart attacks. They agree that trans fat raises levels of LDL cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart disease. But, they said, it makes no sense to focus on it to the exclusion of saturated fat, since Americans eat four times as much saturated fat as trans fat. "What's Public Enemy No. 1 with respect to cholesterol raising?" asked Dr. James Cleeman, coordinator of the National Cholesterol Education Program of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. "From a dietary standpoint, it's saturated fat."

That message is also in the dietary guidelines issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, which reads: "Population-based studies of American diets show that intake of saturated fat is more excessive than intake of trans fat or cholesterol. Therefore it is most important for Americans to decrease their intake of saturated fat." That may be, say trans fat's critics, but trans fat also slightly lowers levels of HDL, the so-called good cholesterol.

True, said Dr. Scott Grundy, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, but "we don't know if that's harmful or not." In fact, Dr. Grundy said, low fat diets also reduce levels of HDL, and they lower it much more than trans fat. "I think the dietary reduction of HDL is kind of in limbo," he said. "We don't know what it means and I wouldn't overplay it."

Some studies of populations have shown what appear to be weak associations between consumption of trans fat and increased risk of heart disease, independent of the amount of saturated fat in the diet. But Dr. Grundy and others said the association is not strong enough to serve as the basis for a public recommendation. As for New York restaurants, Dr. Cleeman advised them not to substitute saturated fat for trans fat. "That's not a help," he said.

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Zero tolerance makes zero sense: "Imagine for a moment that you're a parent with a teenage son. He doesn't drink, but you know his friends do. You're also not naive. You've read the government's statistics: 47 percent of high school students tell researchers they've had a drink of alcohol in the previous 30 days. Thirty percent have had at least five drinks in a row in the past month. Thirteen percent admitted to having driven in the previous month after drinking alcohol. So, what do you do with regard to your son's social life? Many parents have decided to take a realist's approach. They're throwing parties for their kids and their friends. They serve alcohol at these parties, but they also collect car keys to make sure no one drives home until the next morning. Their logic makes sense: The kids are going to drink; it's better that they do it in a controlled, supervised environment. That's exactly what a Rhode Island couple did in 2004. When they learned that their son planned to celebrate the prom with a booze bash at a beach 40 miles away, William and Patricia Anderson instead threw a supervised party for him and his friends at their home. They served alcohol, but William Anderson stationed himself at the party's entrance and collected keys from every teen who showed. No one who came to the party could leave until the next morning. For this the Andersons found themselves arrested and charged with supplying alcohol to minors."