Proposed trans-fat ban gains support

NEW YORK — At the first public hearing on New York's proposal to prohibit the use of artificial trans fats in restaurants — an aggressive move by the city's health commissioner, Thomas Frieden — dozens of scientists lined up to praise the proposal, and some restaurant-industry representatives agreed that such fats should be phased out over time.

The hearing came as KFC said Monday it would stop frying chicken in artery-clogging trans fats at its 5,500 restaurants in the United States.

If the Board of Health votes in favor of the ban in December, New York restaurants would have 18 months to stop using trans fats, commonly contained in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, margarines and shortenings as well as many manufactured baked goods. Trans fats are created when food manufacturers add hydrogen to vegetable oil to make it more solid. Although trans fats were once recommended as a substitute for animal fats, researchers now believe they are a leading cause of heart disease.

Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, said trans fats are "the most dangerous ingredient in our diet," contributing to abdominal weight gain, increasing levels of "bad" cholesterol and worsening insulin resistance. Mozaffarian said consumption of trans fats might account for anywhere between 6 percent and 22 percent of heart attacks in the U.S.

But many restaurant owners in New York still don't know what trans fats are, much less how to eliminate them from their cooking, said Louis Nunez, president of the Latino Restaurant Association. Nunez's group surveyed 1,000 members and found that 982 did not know what trans fats are.

Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association, said the lack of education on the issue, "coupled with significant fines, are a recipe for disaster that could be devastating for New York's restaurants."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg supports a ban. "The next big health issue is obesity," he said. "If you want to do something about it, it's going to require some decisions. It's going to require a cost."

Most speakers at the hearing supported the proposed ban. Dr. Diane Hes, a professor of pediatrics at New York Methodist Hospital, said childhood obesity had become so widespread in New York that she developed a specialty in bariatric medicine. "This is a generation of children who will not outlive their parents," she said.

But Audrey Silk, founder of a group called Citizens Lobbying Against Social Harassment, said: "You have invented for public health a role that it never historically had, and it never ought to have. ... Food isn't medicine. And yet ... you manage to reduce the whole playground of eating ... to the clinical process of 'food intake.' "

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.