Where the trans fat news at?
May 28, 2009 8:18 PM   Subscribe

Is there any website that keeps track of trans fat news now that bantransfat.com quit updating?

In the past, whenever a business was trans-fat free, or at least announced plans to go trans-fat free, I could hear about it on bantransfat.com. Once California signed the bill banning trans-fat though, BTF quit updating their page.

Now that I live in California and the laws won't go into full effect until (I think) next year, I've been curious to know which businesses have already come into compliance with it and which haven't -- especially national chain restaurants, because I have found that sometimes their nutritional information is unchanged in the other states and that's all that's listed, but there are some CA locations that no longer have trans fat.

Looking up individual restaurants is not worth the time; many restaurants don't list any kind of nutritional information, and I can't know if they change anything unless I check again. There aren't any restaurants in particular that I'm curious about anyway, I just like to know whether something is an option. For example, when KFC quit frying its chicken in trans fat, I didn't have to be obsessed with KFC and Google it constantly; I just saw it was trans fat free so we've been there a few times in the years since that happened. I can look up specific restaurants to rule them out, but the webpage ruled things in, if that makes sense. Having the one webpage to look at was pretty convenient, basically.

I'm also curious to hear about other states/cities that are banning trans fat, and that sort of thing.

Any suggestions that don't involve looking up every individual restaurant or Googling "trans fat" for news every day? Or was that one website it?
posted by Nattie to Food & Drink (4 answers total)
 
Use Google alerts to set up email updates or a custom rss feed for the subject of "trans fat."
posted by hooray at 8:32 PM on May 28, 2009


Best answer: If you can't find a website, Google Alerts are jolly useful in this sort of situation. Something like
banned | discontinued | ceased change-to trans-fat
should get you the sorts of results you want, although you'll probably want to do a lot of tweaking on it.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 8:36 PM on May 28, 2009


Response by poster: Thanks, I used the alert you suggested. :D I've never had to use one before so I wasn't sure how to phrase it! I'll tweak it as needed.
posted by Nattie at 8:46 PM on May 28, 2009


To tweak it, look at some articles that are examples of what you want to find and pull out key language from them, using it as another option in the search term. Then look at the results and get rid of the articles you don't want by excluding certain words with - (minus).

By the way, what I wrote above was slightly wrong, it should be:
banned | discontinued | ceased | change-to trans-fat

posted by Busy Old Fool at 9:51 PM on May 28, 2009


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