Chewing the Fat
August 3, 2005 – 4:16 pm | by nerd's eye viewFrom the FDA website: It’s important to know about trans fat because there is a direct, proven relationship between diets high in trans fat content and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels and, therefore, an increased risk of coronary heart disease – a leading cause of death in the US.
Oh my god. The Trader Joe’s greek style yogurt is To Die For. No, I mean it. It’s like that stuff we get in Austria, where, a-hem, we take our dairy very, very seriously. Good lord. And while we’re on about Trader Joe’s, we have to applaud their move to remove all products containing transfats from their stores. We found this out when J. was reading the label on some very tasty looking chocolates by the checkout stand. “What’s in there?” I asked. “Not much,” he replied, “no weird hydrogenated whatever…” The clerk then told us that they were getting rid of everything and anything that had transfat as an ingredient.
This is more than I can say for Alki Bakery, who recently broke our hearts over their cappucino cupcakes which are as rife with transfat as they are delicious. I wrote to them asking them to tell me what delicious treats they make without transfat, and if maybe they couldn’t reconsider their choice of shortening.
If they won’t swap out their ingredients, they could at least label their bakery case so I can make a more educated selection while standing there in my socks. The husband I like to go rollerblading past their beach front store in the middle of those sunny mornings when I’m “working at home.” (Hello Current Employer! It’s a joke! Ha!) They won’t let you wear your skates inside, which makes sense because what’s to keep you from rolling right in to some guy carrying a tray of latte? Talk about your hazards.
It’s not that we are so very obsessive about fat in our diet, only that we are trying not to eat stuff that’s linked directly to dying. All right, that’s a lot of drama around the shortening that’s used in a cupcake, but here at Nerd’s Eye View HQ we’ve noticed that now that we’ve breached 40, we’re not so svelte as we used to be. Hence, the elimination of ingredients that are designed to either kill us or make us fat - or do both.
There’s no need for evil in a cupcake, I tellya. Just use the butter and be done with it. It’s not like we eat ONLY cupcakes, so we could have one with real butter in it now and then, right? Also, we wouldn’t mind getting fat if it would just happen all at once, but it seems like it just sneaks up and before we know it we’re buying new jeans, like that’s not traumatic enough. You are laughing perhaps, but you know as well as I that it’s near impossible to find a pair of jeans that fits. Don’t lie to me, dear reader, I can see right through you.
Transfats, by the way, are not used in Europe, according to the household European, (and confirmed in the middle of this page) and I’m here to tell you that their baked goods do not suffer one bit from the absence. I’m not saying they’re stripping out the calories and or flavor and that a diet of cake without a hearty XC skiing supplement will not fatten you right up. After all, one time I made a classic Austrian cake that started with instructions to grind up a whole chocolate cake. I think it’s only that their cakes are less likely to kill you when consumed in reasonable quantities, they’re certainly not less fattening. Though death by cake-based cake? A better way to die than “Rollerblades meet latte guy. Tragedy ensues.”
Hey, you, reader in Australia, yes you! Drop me a line and introduce yourself. I can see where my readers are coming from, but I’ve got no idea who you are. Actually, that applies to all you folks who are reading regularly. Say hello and tell me how you found me. I just like to know, that’s all. And hello right back atcha.
