Starbucks and Personal Responsibility (Part 2)

Yesterday I noted this item on the AP newswire – “Starbucks to Drop Trans Fats from Items“. Here’s the gist:

Starting Wednesday, all donuts, muffins and other treats sold in half of Starbucks Corp.’s standalone U.S. stores will be completely free of trans fats, the company said. The world’s largest specialty coffee retailer hopes to cut trans fats from the rest of its U.S. and Canadian stores by the end of the year, spokesman Brandon Borrman said. “Our focus has always been on providing our customers with healthy and nutritious food options,” he said.

After reading this I couldn’t help but think about how history seems to be repeating itself – remember when ANY fat in foods was determined to be evil? All the food producers jumped on the “fat free” bandwagon, and the shelves were suddenly stocked with all sorts of implicitly “guilt free” items, including sweets like cakes and cookies.

One item in particular I remembered were the “Snackwell” cookies. These things couldn’t stay in the stores for the longest time (I think there was a particular chocolate variety that was really hard to find – anyone remember that one?). I actually saw two people fighting over a box once.

Funny thing is, the obesity and general unhealthiness of the US population actually went UP in the wake of the fat free craze. Why? Because to make these things still taste good, despite the lack of fat, the food producers added sugar – so the item still possessed a lot of calories. People were eating Snackwells by the dozen and were getting fatter (I confess I purchased more than a few boxes of this stuff myself back then – I call it my “nutritionally naive” period).

And so, reading about the trans fat issue yesterday leads me to fear that these kinds of press releases and promotion of “healthy” alternatives without trans fats will once again have the opposite effect, because of a focus on only one particular unhealthy aspect. Looking at total consumption is still the only way to really manage our health, and as I noted on a previous posting, it’s still our responsibility to take a hard look at what’s inside our food, not the providers.

The “insiders” over at Starbucks Gossip also seem to “get” this – using someone eating 3 lemon pound cakes as an example, one commenter noted, “if you are eating more three slices of lemon cake a day then you have more to worry about than trans fats“.

Hey, it’s a good thing to eliminate trans fats – they serve no purpose in food other than it’s cheaper and stays usable longer – but, we should be a little less apt to connect “trans fat free” with “healthy”, because what’s left in that cake or muffin still needs to be considered before you take a bite.

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