Sev­er­al years ago, when I was a free­lance nutri­tion edi­tor for Child mag­a­zine, I got into a heat­ed dis­agree­ment with sev­er­al of the senior edi­tors. The mag­a­zine want­ed me to write an arti­cle telling par­ents on how to find food prod­ucts that were low in trans fat. My argu­ment was, and still is, that if we advise Amer­i­cans to eat less of the foods that tra­di­tion­al­ly are high in trans fat “fried chick­en, donuts, com­mer­cial cakes and cook­ies, chips and crack­ers, hard stick mar­garine” the trans fat issue take care of itself.

So where are we today? Man­u­fac­tur­ers are refor­mu­lat­ing their food prod­ucts to be free of trans fat, and restau­rants in New York, Philadel­phia, and oth­er cities and states are being required to pre­pare all foods with­out trans fat. But it’s impor­tant to ask what is replac­ing trans fat. In many cas­es, the “new” fat, for exam­ple, but­ter in baked goods, is more sat­u­rat­ed than the fat it is replac­ing. Remem­ber that par­tial­ly hydro­genat­ed veg­etable oil “the source of most of our trans fat” was invent­ed as a health­i­er alter­na­tive to high­ly sat­u­rat­ed but­ter, lard and suet.

Does it mat­ter that fried chick­en, donuts and cook­ies now are trans fat free? In my opin­ion, no. They still are too high in calo­ries and too low in nutri­tion to be a reg­u­lar part of any­one’s diet. And in an era when obe­si­ty is a grow­ing prob­lem in this coun­try, I would argue that eat­ing too many calo­ries and too much fat, not too much trans fat, is our biggest health con­cern. The Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion is a great resource for infor­ma­tion on healthy eat­ing. Check out the AHA’s fat cal­cu­la­tor, www.americanheart.org/facethefats, to find out how much fat you should beat­ing and which foods can be part of a healthy diet.