Fear and loathing over trans fats

Another fat replacer for baked products is rice-based CNP Fat Replacer, discovered serendipitously by California Natural Products (www.californianatural.com), Lathrop, Calif., during a search for fat replacement in ice cream applications. "The all-natural rice syrup solid acts like solid fat and helps create the texture associated with shortening in baked products,” says John Ashby, general manager-ingredients. "The ingredient relies on the granulation of rice starch to mimic the slippery, creamy mouthfeel of fat globules, and it duplicates the organoleptic properties of solid fats in ice cream and shortening in baked products." CNP Fat Replacer may be incorporated into a wide variety of baked products exactly like solid fat and with a simply clean label declaration of "rice syrup solids."

Advanced nutritional solutions

"The tremendous work under way to reformulate and repackage manufactured foods can be turned into a positive for consumers and brands by repositioning food products as being heart-healthy,” says Ian Lucas, vice president of marketing and new product development at Ocean Nutrition, (www.ocean-nutrition.com), a Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, processor of marine-based food ingredients. Not only is the removal of bad fats good for the heart, he says, but the inclusion of omega-3 fatty acids can provide added benefits.

Canola oil provided the solution for removal of trans fats for all these products. Photo courtesy of Canola Council of Canada.

That’s also the case with a second Source Food Technology product, OmegaSource, a proprietary omega-3 fish oil with specially processed phytosterols (a cholesterol-fighting plant ingredient allowed a heart-health claim by the FDA). Phytosterols also figure in Source Food’s Nextra Gold. The vegetable-based cooking oil without trans fats or cholesterol has phytosterols incorporated to further counter the absorption of cholesterol from fried foods. Source Food has focused on foodservice frying operations because it recognizes the need for viable solutions for a category that reportedly uses five of the total eight billion pounds of frying oil used annually to fry foods in the U.S.

Antioxidants are another helpful and powerful solution. Palm oils have good shelf life not only because they are low in linolenic and linoleic acids but also because they are rich in antioxidants such as tocopherols and tocotrienols, which help resist oxidation and rancidity. This property has helped food companies such as Kraft and Kellogg to remove trans fats and maintain the shelf life in products such as Golden Uh-Oh!s, and Cracklin' Oat Bran cereals, respectively. According to the American Palm Oil Council (www.americanpalmoil.com), processors stand to benefit tremendously from a growing awareness of the health properties of the antioxidants in addition to the stability it bestows upon the products.

Another solution is Enova oil. Japan’s Kao Corp. created the product by a proprietary molecular rearrangement of soy and canola oils such that the diacylglycerol concentration is approximately 80 percent, 70 percent of which is made up of the 1,3-form. The configuration allows for Enova oil to be digested and absorbed as triacylglycerols, but to be metabolized as energy.

Intestinal enzymes cannot metabolize 1,3-diacylglycerols because of their unique shape and conversely cannot recombine them into fat molecules. So less fat passes into the bloodstream to be stored in the body. Enova, introduced in 1999, is the No. 1 premium cooking oil in Japan. The product is made and marketed in the U.S. by a joint venture between Kao and ADM.

But do we really have to switch? Willie Loh, national sales manager for Cargill Specialty Canola Oils (www.clearvalleyoils.com), Wayzata, Minn., suggests marketers figure out the value of the trans fat-free switch by polling for consumer values and price elasticity. Do customers merely want to minimize trans fats, or are they seeking “front-of-the-package” claims with clear statements such as "zero gram trans fats" or "saturated fat free."

"While consumers are unlikely to know what trans fats are, they do know they are bad for their health. They also know saturated fats are bad and too many calories are bad." The question, he says, is how much are they willing to pay for these benefits.

In conclusion, it should be acknowledged that some food product developers privately believe the crusade against trans fats is more about marketing and less about health. There also is some concern from food industry critics that the removal of trans fat may create the illusion of food companies doing the healthy thing without really changing their high fat products. That’s especially true for those processors who choose to replace trans fats with high saturated fat alternatives.

But a mandate, even just a labeling one, is still a mandate. And it’s apparent many consumers are catching on. Whatever the cost to the industry of replacing trans fats, the cost of losing consumers is incalculable.