Are Fast Food “Trans-Fat” Claims True? An Infraspec VFA-IR Spectrometer Analysis of Trans-fat content in select food items purchased from Long John Silver’s

Studies linking high trans-fat diets to coronary heart disease (CHD) have prompted the need to regulate, limit, or completely ban trans-fat from all commercial food products, including fast foods. Many U.S. fast food chains now claim that their food items, particularly French fries, have "no trans-fat". In a previous study, our lab tested the validity of trans-fat claims made by several popular fast food restaurants by experimentally determining the %trans-fat in oil extracted from fast food French fries. In some cases, the trans-fat content was nearly twice as high as the amount reported by the restaurant in their literature. Long John Silverʹs, for example, reported a trans-fat content of 25% for their French fries, while our lab actually found over 40% trans-fat. The purpose of this study is to broaden our study of Long John Silverʹs trans-fat claims by analyzing a variety of their food items and comparing our findings with the %trans-fat reported by the restaurant literature (nutrition fact tables). Variable Filter Array (VFA) IR spectroscopy was used to assess the trans-fat content of oil extracted from food samples. Our preliminary findings suggest that nearly every food item under study contained considerably more trans-fat than the amount reported in the restaurant’s literature.