WASHINGTON — Turns out it’s possible to make a fast-food lunch a bit healthier even without skipping the fries.
New York City now has hard evidence that its ban on trans fat in restaurant food made a meaningful dent in people’s consumption of the artery clogger.
“By making the default option the healthier choice,” everyone benefits regardless of nutrition awareness or willpower, wrote Alice Lichtenstein, a nutrition specialist at Tufts University, in a commentary on the research.
In the study by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, researchers surveyed customers and collected receipts for nearly 15,000 lunchtime purchases at fast-food chains across the city in 2007 and 2009, before and after the ban was in place. The amount of trans fat in each lunch sold dropped by an average of 2.4 grams after the ban, researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Annals of Internal Medicine. The biggest drop, 3.8 grams, occurred in hamburger chains, followed by Mexican-food and fried-chicken chains.
