How to fight fat fast

Avoiding trans fats found in margarine, salad dressings, fried foods and baked goods like crackers, pastries and cookies is one of the most important food choices you can make


There are smart choices to make right now to help you reduce this unhealthful type of fat in your life.

Found in dairy products and meats, trans fatty acids are also produced during the processing that improves the stability and lengthens the shelf life of vegetable oils. Leading food sources of trans fat are margarine, salad dressings, fried foods and baked goods like crackers, pastries and cookies.

ike saturated fat, trans fat raises heart disease risk by boosting the deleterious cholesterol known as low-density lipoprotein (LDL). But some scientists, including Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, consider trans fat worse than saturated fat. That's because trans fat also raises other detrimental blood fats, lowers the protective form of cholesterol (high-density lipoprotein, or HDL) and appears to increase insulin resistance — a key step toward developing diabetes.

"Avoiding trans fats is one of the most important food choices you can make," Willett says. "They have no redeeming value."

Consumption of trans fat not only contributes to heart disease risk but also helps fuel the obesity epidemic, US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson noted. "We need to get people focused on preventing disease by eating less and exercising more," Thompson said. But you already knew that, right?

Here's what you can do to reduce trans fat:

• Put a cap on unhealthful fat. The FDA stopped short of setting a daily intake for trans fat. Instead, the FDA said that total intake of saturated fat and trans fat should be less than 20 grams per day for people eating about 2,000 calories a day.

• Look for partially hydrogenated fat on food labels — but put it in context. Yes, that ingredient is a tipoff to the presence of trans fats. But if that's all you focus on, you could eliminate some healthful foods from your diet. Case in point: Some healthful margarines and salad dressings with canola or soybean oil contain trace amounts of partially hydrogenated oil. Check out where partially hydrogenated oil falls on the ingredient list. The lower, the better.

• Reach for the margarine tub, not the stick. Choose products that have "no more than two grams of saturated fat per tablespoon and with liquid vegetable oil as the first ingredient", advises the American Heart Association nutrition committee.

• Use healthful fat. Good choices of healthful fat include: olive, canola, soybean and flaxseed oils as well as nuts, avocados, fish and olives.

• Easy does it in restaurants. Fast food and restaurant fare "are major sources of trans fat and don't come with food labels", Willett says. "Assume that any deep fat fried food or commercial baked products are going to be loaded with trans fat unless there is information to the contrary."

• When in doubt, go low-fat. Foods that contain less than three grams of fat per serving "will be pretty safe", says Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the consumer group that leads the charge on the trans-fat issue.

• Watch for more reformulated products. Frito-Lay, maker of Doritos and other popular snack foods, already labels trans fat. Craft has announced plans to reformulate many of its products, as has Unilever Bestfoods, maker of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" spreads. McDonald's has committed to making its french fries free of trans fat.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service