Fat Substitutes Health Article

Fat Substitutes

Since the late 1980s, fat-free and reduced-fat foods have become widely available. While not all new products survive the competitive marketplace, thousands of new reduced-fat and fat-free products have been introduced each year since 1990.

In part, these new reduced-fat food products are the result of consumer demand. But they are also a response to public health concerns and initiatives. In 1990, Healthy People 2000 asked food manufacturers to double the availability of reduced-fat food products by the year 2000, a goal that was easily met.

Dietary Fat

Despite fat's bad reputation, it is a very important nutrient. Dietary fat plays many critical roles in the body, such as providing essential fatty acids, fat-soluble vitamins, and energy. It also serves structural functions in hormones and in cells.

Fat is also a key factor in how foods taste. Fat absorbs the essence of spices and flavors and allows people to experience their full aroma. Not only does fat carry flavor, it also determines whether a cookie crunches or a muffin crumbles. In other words, fat is one of the main reasons people enjoy food.

Since the 1970s, nutrition scientists have researched the effects of diet on chronic diseases. Eating a diet lower in fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol appears to help prevent or delay the development of some serious illnesses, such as certain cancers and heart disease.

Most government health agencies and professional health organizations encourage people five years old and older to eat a diet with less than 30 percent of total calories from fat, and less than 10 percent of that from saturated fat.

Consumers are concerned about nutrition, and they want to moderate the fat in their diet but there are challenges to overcome. Nutrition, price, convenience, and product safety are important, but taste is the key driver behind food selection for most people. And many consumers still think that less fat means less taste. Fat substitutes were developed to help meet consumers' expectations about taste while providing fewer calories from fat.

What Are Fat Substitutes?

Substitutes, or fat replacers, provide the sensory and functional qualities normally provided by fat. For example, fat provides moistness in baked goods, texture in ice cream, and crispiness in potato chips. Because fat has so many diverse functions in foods, it is virtually impossible to replace it with a single compound or process. The ingredients used in place of fat depend on how a food product will be eaten or prepared. For instance, not all fat-substitute ingredients are stable when heated, so the type of fat substitute used in a fat-free salad dressing may not work well in a muffin mix.

Many fat substitutes are simply old ingredients used in new ways. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved polydextrose for use as a moisture-binding agent in the early 1980s, but more recently it

has been used as a fat substitute. Carrageenan has been used since the early 1960s as an emulsifier, stabilizer, and thickener, but is now commonly used to replace fat in foods, as is guar gum, which has been used as a thickener for nearly a hundred years.

Some fat substitutes are newer to the food supply, though they are made from familiar ingredients. For example, microparticulated protein is made from milk, egg, or whey protein. Other fat substitutes are new ingredients made from combinations of basic molecules.

In some cases, the FDA has approved fat-reduction ingredients as food additives. To be approved, food additives are tested extensively to assess their safety and level of use among different population groups. Examples of fat substitutes approved as food additives include carrageenan, olestra, and polydextrose.

In other instances, fat-reduction ingredients are "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS). GRAS ingredients are made from common food components and are considered by experts to be safe. For example, many spices and flavoring agents, such as sugar and salt, are GRAS ingredients. Examples of GRAS fat substitutes include guar gum and maltodextrin.