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Tempting FatThe coming crackdown on trans fats.

By William Saletan
Posted Saturday, Dec. 9, 2006, at 1:31 AM ET

Put your hands in the air, and step away from the cookie.

That's the message from New York City, where the health department has just ordered the city's 25,000 restaurants to purge nearly all trans fats from their menus. Restaurant owners are terrified that other cities will follow. In the dough business, like show business, New York leads the way. If you can't bake it there, you can't bake it anywhere.

The whole world is engulfed in a war on fat. On one side are health crusaders. On the other side are food sellers and libertarians. Lately, the health costs of obesity have prodded politicians into the war, shifting the balance of power to the crusaders. Still, Americans draw the line at food. You stamped out our cigarettes, you made us wear seat belts, but you'll get our burgers when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.

But that's the funny thing about trans fats: They aren't exactly food. A century ago, they hardly existed. Nature didn't mass-produce them; we did. By adding hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils—hence the term "partially hydrogenated"—we learned how to solidify these oils, mimicking butter. The first trans-fat triumph, in 1911, was Crisco.

Solidity remains a central purpose of this technology. Look at the New York health department's list of products made with trans fats: french fries, taco shells, doughnuts, pizza dough, crackers, cookies, and pie crusts. What do these products have in common? They start out spongy and end up crunchy. Trans fats create texture, not flavor. They allow fast frying, so you can make food crispy without losing its moisture. And they're slow to go bad, so you can keep cookies longer on store shelves.

Trans fats proliferated because they were cheap. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, when we learned how harmful saturated fats were, manufacturers and restaurants dumped them and switched to trans fats. As the National Restaurant Association bitterly observed in its testimony against the New York ban, trans fats are everywhere because the "industry replaced one fat with another."

Everything that's wrong with trans fats follows from their industrial heritage. In nature, things generally don't stick around unless they serve some purpose. Cream is lousy for adult arteries, but it nourishes babies of all kinds. In nature, things that are harmful in excess tend to disappear unless they're safe in moderation. And nature is always looking for alternatives, so if something dangerous is still here, it has probably been hard to replace.

None of these things is true of trans fats. They're worse than saturated fats, because, in addition to raising bad cholesterol, they lower good cholesterol. As the health department points out, "there is no safe level of artificial trans fat consumption … in contrast to other dietary fats which, when consumed in moderation, are a natural part of a healthy diet. Artificially produced trans fat is relatively new to our food supply and confers no known health benefit."

Because trans fats are industrial, regulating them feels like regulating chemicals, not food. The department understands this. In its two documents explaining the ban, it uses the word "artificial" 77 times. It points out that most restaurant customers "have no way of knowing whether or not a product contains trans fat." Restaurant associations admit that even their members don't know what trans fats are. So, it's hard to defend trans fats as a free choice.

Because trans fats are industrial, they're easy to replace. Businesses that switched to them years ago can switch again. Many already have. You can even buy Crisco without them. Companies that cling to trans fats fret that their food won't taste the same, but companies that have let go say customers can't tell the difference. After all, trans fats were never about taste. McDonald's insists that despite years of research, it hasn't found a trans-fat-free oil that will keep its fries McDelicious. Please. You can get trans-fat-free fries at McDonald's right now. You just have to go to one of its franchises in Denmark, where trans fats are virtually illegal.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
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