Matthew Reich is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He uses butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds the public health effort to get artificial trans fat out of food.
But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat hysteria, Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to substitute processed fats like palm oil and margarine for good old-fashioned butter because of the small amounts of natural trans fat butter contains.
Some researchers believe that trans fat that occurs naturally might actually be healthy. But to satisfy companies that want to call their foods completely free of trans fats, bakers like Reich are altering serving sizes, cutting back on butter and in some cases using ingredients like trans fat-free margarine.
Reich still uses butter for many of his clients, but he has had to adjust what he bakes for almost 500 Starbucks stores from Philadelphia to Hartford, Connecticut.
"It's causing problems for every big baker in the country," he said. "I didn't even know where to find trans-free margarine."
Starbucks, which sells millions of baked goods a day at its 8,700 US stores, has asked all of the bakers who provide its pastries to eliminate any trace of trans fat by the end of the year. The change has already happened in Washington and Oregon. California bakers are reworking recipes this month to try to meet a Starbucks deadline.
"For us, it's easier for the customer to walk in and see zero grams trans fat than zero grams artificially created trans fat," said Brandon Borman, a company spokesman.
The focus on removing trans fat has centered on the kind created by partial hydrogenation, which turns liquid oil into a solid fat like shortening that adds creaminess and shelf life to commercial baked goods and, for home cooks, makes a flaky pie crust. Trans fat is also created when certain inexpensive and sturdy oils are heated in deep-fat fryers.
But US citizens eat far more artificial trans fat than natural trans fat, which is found in small amounts in butter and meat. This artificial trans fat is the kind that New York City health officials decided to ban from restaurants, citing health studies that show that even a couple a grams of it a day can significantly increase the chance of a heart attack. Whether natural trans fats have the same health effect is still being explored by scientists, and some researchers believe the natural ones may actually be beneficial.
But to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency in charge of food labeling, and thus to large companies like Starbucks, there is no difference between the trans fat that occurs in the stomachs of ruminant animals and shows up in cream, butter, cheese and beef, and the kind that is artificially created and favored in large-scale food manufacturing.
A federal law that took effect last year states that if a product has 0.5g or more of trans fat per serving, the amount has to go on the food label and the food can't be called trans fat-free, even if butter is the only fat.
One bakery that tested its food for Starbucks discovered that some of its all-butter pastries had as much as 0.79g of trans fat per serving. The baker asked not to be named in print for fear that Starbucks would cancel its contracts.
"This is an important issue because anything made with animal fats will have trans fats and make it impossible to claim trans fat-free," said Marion Nestle, nutrition professor at New York University. "Milk has trans fats, after all, and you can see what a mess this is going to cause."
The Schwartz Bros bakery has been providing Starbucks with baked goods in the Northwest since Starbucks had only 13 stores. Now, bakeries in Seattle and Portland provide the pastries to about 600 Starbucks outlets.
"We've gone back and replaced all of the nice, good butter with supposedly trans fat-free margarine," said Rick Doyle, the Schwartz regional manager. "The hardest one for us was the croissant. We replaced butter with palm oil. From my perspective it's not a croissant any more. It's lost all its lamination and flavor."
Still, he thinks most customers won't notice. And the products have had to pass several taste tests at Starbucks, where company officials have worked with bakers to adjust recipes.
Sometimes the change means eliminating butter or other dairy products that register trans fat; other times it means reducing portion sizes so nutritional analysis shows that, for example, a cookie has less than 0.5g of trans fat per serving.
The whole matter shows that the rules have gone too far, said Greg Miller, a spokesman for the National Dairy Council.
"Things like a New York ban on trans fats create hysteria, and when you create hysteria people overreact, and when people overreact they start taking whole food groups out of their diet because there might be a little trans in it," he said.
He and others point out that a plate of french fries can contain 5g or more of artificial trans fat and a doughnut 4g, while 1 tablespoon of butter, 2 cups of milk or a beef hot dog can have 0.5g or less of the naturally occurring kind.
When the FDA was considering last year's trans fat labeling law, the dairy council and others argued that natural trans fat should be uncoupled from artificial trans fat because natural trans fat might not be dangerous and because people get relatively little trans fat from meat and dairy products.
Dale Bauman, a Cornell University professor who specializes in animal science, says natural trans fat can be used by the body to synthesize conjugated linoleic acid, a good fatty acid that could help prevent diseases like cancer. Other trans fat researchers are a little more cautious, but still believe natural and artificial trans fat should not be viewed with the same concern.
Walter Willet of the Harvard School of Public Health said the chemical makeup "of specific trans fatty acids in dairy fat is different than in industrial partially hydrogenated trans fat, so it is possible that the effects are different."
In his original paper on trans fat in 1993, which is largely credited for revolutionizing thinking on partially hydrogenated oils, Willet found that the increased risk of heart disease was associated with the amount of industrial trans fats people ate. But he cautions that even if the trans fat in butter turns out to be fine, the saturated fat it contains will always be a concern.
In the end, the FDA decided not to distinguish between the two fats, and requires all trans fat amounts to be labeled if there is 0.5g or more per serving. The half-gram mark is in part because it would be impossible to rid the nation's diet of the natural trans fat in meats and dairy products.
As processed food manufacturers and fast-food restaurants struggle to find new kinds of trans fat-free oils, and some bakers struggle over what to do about butter, the natural trans fat in meat has gone largely unnoticed. Two ounces of ground beef would be over the limit.
But nervous meat purveyors are starting to ask about it, especially as more and more city health officials push through trans fat bans, said Lynn Morrissette, senior director of regulatory affairs for the American Meat Institute.
"I have to believe that even if it hasn't happened yet, it's coming," she said.
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