You're probably aware that on January 1 of this year a rule requiring manufacturers to
list trans fats on all food labels took effect.
Specifically, the FDA now obliges “…manufacturers of conventional foods
and some dietary supplements to list trans fats on a separate line, immediately
under saturated fat on the nutritional label.”
(See the FDA website at http://www.fda.gov/oc/initiatives/transfat/
for further information). Because I only
rarely purchase products containing trans fats (such as margarines, salad
dressings, and certain baked and fried goods), I haven't been paying much attention to
the new rule or the new labels. Well, imagine
my surprise, then, when I went to buy my favorite butter, Celles sur Belle, and
found small red markings on the package describing the amount of trans fats!
Shocked, I did what any sane person would do: I
tossed the little brick back onto its cold shelf and bungled about looking for
a pack of untainted butter. There were
quite a few brands that did not list trans fats on their labels – Lurpak, Strauss Creamery, Plugra. The fellow who stocks the dairy case explained that these butters were packaged before the January 1 label deadline and were still displayed because they hadn't yet passed their expiration dates. The Celles packages, on the other hand, were more recently produced. Whatever the reason, I cared for none of these alternatives and left the store sans mon beurre.
What's the deal with trans fats in butter? Would I ever again be able to enjoy my Celles?
As it turns out, my alarm was somewhat misguided. Small amounts of natural trans fats are, in
fact, common in many dairy products.
Last year, Robert M. Wolke, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, published a piece in the Washington
Post explaining the matter. “When cows
and other ruminants…eat vegetable matter, some of the unsaturated FAs in their
diets become partially hydrogenated by bacteria in the animals' rumens -- the
first and biggest of their several stomachs. And just as in factory-produced
hydrogenation, bacterial hydrogenation produces trans FAs that wind up in the
milk fat and cheese, the meat's fat, and, to a lesser extent, in the meat
itself. Somewhere between 2 and 9 percent of the FAs in butter, for example,
depending on its source, are trans FAs.”
(See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36400-2005Mar15.html).
Whether or not these natural trans fats are safer than trans
fats resulting from commercial hydrogenation remains a matter of scientific
debate. As Wolke points out in his
article, the "ruminant industries" would certainly like for us to believe so. Still, even assuming that all trans fats are
equally harmful, consider this: the folks at the University of Maryland Medical Center
calculate that there are approximately 5 to 8 grams of hydrogenated trans fats in a stick of
margarine; I calculate less than 1 gram of natural trans fats in a brick of Celles sur Belle.
I’ll take le beurre, merci.
12:51:20 PM 
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