By Genevra Pittman
NEW YORK | Mon Jul 16, 2012
5:04pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Fast-food
patrons in New York City are eating far less unhealthy fat since restrictions on
its use by restaurants were imposed four years ago, a report sponsored by the
city said.
Trans fats, especially common in hydrogenated vegetable oils, have been
linked to long-term heart disease risk.
The study, released on Monday, found the average meal went from containing
nearly three grams of trans fat to just half a gram.
“It’s a small step forward,” said Alice Lichtenstein, a nutrition science
researcher from Tufts University in Boston, who wrote an editorial accompanying
the study in the Annals of Internal Medicine bit.ly/MnBiCA.
“This is just trans fat. It doesn’t have any effect on calories. It doesn’t
mean that you can eat as much of it as you want,” she told Reuters
Health.
“We have to think about these changes within the context of the whole diet.
This is one small change in the right direction. We need a whole lot
more.”
In 2006, New York City passed regulations prohibiting restaurants from
serving food that contains partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and has half a
gram or more of trans fat per serving. Those restrictions went into effect in
2008.
To test the policy’s result, researchers briefly surveyed customers leaving
168 different fast-food restaurants, belonging to 11 popular chains, the year
before and the year after the restrictions were first enforced.
Those chains included McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and Yum Brands Inc
restaurants KFC and Pizza Hut.
Based on receipts from 6,969 customers surveyed in 2007, the average
fast-food meal purchased that year had 2.9 grams of trans fat. By 2009, that
figure was 0.5 grams in a sample of 7,885 customers.
The number of meals without any trans fat increased from 32 percent of all
purchases before the regulations to 59 percent afterward.
What’s more, there was no spike in the amount of saturated fat in fast-food
meals during the study period – as some had feared – so the total amount of
“bad” fats in the average purchase dropped substantially.
Trans fat is “fully replaceable with healthier oils, so we knew that was
something that could be changed,” said Christine Curtis, from the New York City
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who worked on the study.
“We were really pleased,” she told Reuters Health. The study “really
demonstrates that local regulation can reduce exposure to trans fat.”
Curtis said the trans-fat regulation could end up leading to health benefits
down the line. “It does have the potential to have a really big impact on
cardiovascular disease risk,” she said.
(Editing by Christine Soares and Xavier