Students' diets include too much fat

By <br>By Adam Rosen
Daily Staff Reporter  On  December 9th, 2003

In the world of never-ending exams and papers, most students
— except for a few health-conscious ones — are too
apathetic or too busy to pay attention to everything they put into
their bodies.

When Business School senior Mark Schumacher goes to the store
for groceries, he said he glances at the nutrition labels listed on
his favorite foods about half the time.

But Schumacher said he felt he was one of the few students who
even bother to look at nutrition labels. “Judging by my
roommates, students don’t care at all about checking at
labels,” he said.

Registered MFit dietitian Kathy Fitzgerald said the student
lifestyle probably contributes to a large intake of fats,
particularly a synthetically-produced one known as “trans
fatty acids,” or just trans fats.

“I’m sure it varies from individual to individual,
but if you tend to eat out a lot, eat fried foods or frozen
dinners, you’re probably getting a lot of trans fats,”
Fitzgerald said.

Almost anything that sits on the grocery store shelf for a long
period of time likely contains this potentially heart-hazardous
fat, used as a flavor enhancer and preservative. But trans fats are
not yet listed on food nutrition labels, Fitzgerald added.

Originally thought to be a healthier alternative to saturated
fat, this chemically-engineered substance has until recently
avoided the scrutiny reserved for more well-known culprits of
unhealthiness — saturated fats and cholesterol — by an
increasingly health-conscious public.

According to a statement on the Food and Drug
Administration’s website, “consumption of saturated
fat, trans fat, and dietary cholesterol raises low-density
lipoprotein (LDL) or ‘bad’ cholesterol, levels, which
increases the risk for coronary heart disease.”

In July, the FDA mandated that a list of amounts of trans fats
present must be documented on a food item’s nutrition label.
But, this ruling will not go into effect until January 1, 2006.

Food manufacturers have two years to make the public aware of
their trans fat content so they will have enough time to properly
test foods for these fats, as well as physically change the
millions of nutrition labels that line grocery stores across the
country, said Anita Sandretto, nutrition program director at the
School of Public Health.

Currently, the only way for people to discern the presence of
trans fats in food is to check whether or not a
partially-hydrogenated oil is among the ingredients.

“The (process of making) trans-fatty acids is something
we’ve done to ourselves — we’ve taken liquid fats
and hydrogenated them so that products can sit on the shelf
longer,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a convenience
thing.”

The reason it has taken so long for the FDA to mandate listing
of this other type of fat is because it takes a long time for its
effects to become evident, chemistry Prof. Kathleen Nolta said.

Nolta added that the importance of these new labeling procedures
cannot be overlooked.

“While it is a no-brainer to avoid using fats and oils
high in trans fats, saturated fats, and cholesterol, it is a real
problem to choose wiser when confronted with prepared foods and
fast foods where the real amounts of added ingredients are not
known.”

The real question is whether or not FDA labeling of trans fats
will have any effect on how students choose to purchase their food
in the future.

Schumacher said he was not very convinced that labeling trans
fats would have an impact on students, mainly because they
weren’t educated enough to know what was bad for them.

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