The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz

Author:Nina Teicholz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-05-12T22:00:00+00:00

Big Fat Reformulation

When trans fats had to be removed from food products, the fundamental problem encountered by the industry was that it had no solid-fat option to use in its products. It could not go back to using saturated fats because, after decades of training, many people in supermarket aisles had customarily come to flip over packages to look at the saturated-fat content, and food companies knew that any upwards tick in these fats by even just 0.5 grams might alienate their customers. “Everyone is so sensitive to saturated-fat content. That’s just our basic reality,” said ADM’s Mark Matlock, reflecting the industry view.

Yet without a hard fat, as we’ve seen, it’s nearly impossible to make most processed food products. When Marie Callender tried using liquid soybean oil in its frozen dinners, for instance, the oil puddled under the roasted potatoes and caused the sauce to slip right off the meat, leaving it barren and dry. “It wasn’t very appealing,” said Pat Verduin, senior vice president for product quality and development at ConAgra. Hard fats are needed for structure, texture, and longevity. For cooking and baking, a hard fat is essential.

Historically, lard, butter, suet, and tallow had been widely used in domestic kitchens for cooking and baking. And these were what large food manufacturers had originally used, too, plus some palm and coconut oil. But then the industry switched over almost entirely to partially hydrogenated oils. And now that the trans fats in these oils were found to be a problem for health, food companies were left without options. They had no acceptable solid fat with which to make many of their products.

Food companies in Europe faced the same dilemma, but at least they could shift over to tropical oils, since Europeans had not been exposed to so much negative publicity as Americans had about those foreign imports. Said Martijn Katan, the Dutch biochemist, “In the US, companies shot themselves in the foot, because they could have used some palm oil to give a bit of solid in the fat. But in the US, palm oil was like arsenic.”

Fearing palm oil and barred from returning to animal fats, the food industry faced a giant challenge. They had to figure out how to fry and cook without hard fats, and this challenge sent many of them back to the same company labs that had invented trans fats to begin with—to find a new kind of fat altogether.

For food companies, the complexities were enormous and the risk to every reformulated food item nerve-racking. “You notice the difference when you change the oil!” exclaimed Gill Leveille, the former vice president of research technical services at Nabisco, who participated in overseeing the company’s changeover from palm oil to hydrogenated oils in the 1980s and remembers what it was like to face that same reformulation challenge fifteen years later: “The vision of doing that all over again to get rid of trans, and fewer options this time, was a nightmare, for us and every company.”

“You don’t just have to take the trans fat out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.