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| Contact: Christine Hill (612) 873-5719 |
02/04/09 |
Beginning this month, food served at Hennepin County Medical Center will be trans-fat free. This is the first hospital in the Twin Cities to overhaul its menu and eliminate manufactured trans-fat from the food it prepares for patients, staff and visitors. Dietitians and managers in the Food and Nutrition Services Department decided that going trans-fat free was simply the “right thing to do,” so they set a goal of being trans-fat free as of February 2009.
“We were discussing the trans-fat bans and decided to explore the possibility of eliminating trans-fat from our Café, catering and patient nutrition program,” explains Bill Marks, Director of Food and Nutrition Services at Hennepin, which is contracted by Sodexo. “We reviewed nutrition labels on all of the 900-plus food items we purchase on a weekly basis and discovered that roughly 130 of our products contained trans-fat. Of these products, we quickly found replacements for 60. The remaining 70 items required more extensive investigation into alternate products, recipe changes or elimination of the items altogether.”
“For example, we had to change bakeries,” said Marks. “The bakery we were using was not willing to produce trans-fat free products. We identified an alternate bakery which is a trans-fat free operation and negotiated with them to meet our daily needs. They even provided us with documentation that their products are trans-fat free.”
There are two types of trans-fat: manufactured and natural. Manufactured (also known as partially hydrogenated oils), where hydrogen is added to liquid vegetable oil to make it a solid. These are the “bad” trans-fats that are typically found in pastries, cookies, shortening, convenience foods, fried items, and salad dressings. Natural trans-fat is found in meats, i.e., hamburger, roast beef, lamb, butterfat.
During the past several years, there’s been a lot of research explaining how bad trans-fats are for our health. They can contribute to cardiovascular disease and increased LDL cholesterol levels. There are a few areas in the country that have passed laws banning the use of manufactured trans-fat oils. This initiative is gaining momentum as many local and state governments are now considering banning some if not all food with trans-fat from restaurants and institutional food services. Here in the Twin Cities, similar ordinances are currently being proposed.
“It’s simply impossible to ignore the facts about trans-fat, and there’s no reason why foods containing them can’t be replaced,” says Marks. “We worked with our food vendors to accomplish this goal and overall, our costs were minimally affected. We all feel so much better about providing these healthy alternatives.”
Celebrating its 20th year of being Minnesota’s first Level 1 Trauma Center, Hennepin County Medical Center is a comprehensive academic medical center and public teaching hospital with the largest emergency department in the state. In addition to the 446-bed acute care hospital and primary care and specialty clinics located in downtown Minneapolis, Hennepin offers four primary care clinics in Minneapolis and suburban Hennepin County.
For the twelfth year in a row, Hennepin County Medical Center is listed in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top U.S. Hospitals in its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” report.
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