0g trans fat = 0g transparency

It makes me smile to think that in just a couple of weeks, New York City’s ban on the use of artificial trans fats in restaurant kitchens will be phased in. But as I continue to ponder that nefarious substance, my brow furrows...

I know this is old news, but it’s so irksome that I just need to vent for a second. Also, I keep finding people who missed the media blitz on this issue and therefore reasonably but mistakenly believe that when a package of cookies or crackers proclaims that it has zero grams of trans fat, it means the product contains no trans fat. It doesn’t. Per the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, 0g actually means .49g or less.

Why is that? I don’t know, but it’s just wrong, and I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Perhaps you’re saying to yourself, half a gram doesn’t sound like much—what’s the big deal? Well, it wouldn’t be if (a) trans fat weren’t so evil (according to the National Academy of Sciences, there’s no safe level of consumption of the stuff—which not only raises bad cholesterol but lowers good cholesterol) and if (b) recommended serving sizes weren’t so out of whack with actual consumption habits. Who eats only a couple Oreos in one sitting, after all?

And as BanTransFats.com points out, there’s also the problem that oftentimes we eat more than one trans-fatty food at a time. So even if you did happen to eat only the serving size of Oreos while hobnobbing at a party, let’s say you also snarfed down one serving each of two other items with “0g” of trans fat. If each one contained 0.49 grams per serving, that would mean you just consumed nigh unto 1.5 grams of trans fat.

In this context, a gram is a pretty fat unit of measure to be rounded down to zero so casually, don’t you think?