Cookies The Heart Can Love

By Anastasia Toufexis

As every cook knows, tinkering with a favorite recipe can bring grunts of disapproval from family and friends. For a food company, such tampering invites an even greater disaster: plummeting sales. Today, though, food manufacturers are busily reformulating some of their most popular products. Early this month, Keebler became the fourth major company since last fall -- joining Pepperidge Farm, Kellogg and Sunshine Biscuits -- to announce a switch in ingredients. The change: replacing highly saturated tropical oils with less saturated fats.

The move, which affects such items as Kellogg's Cracklin' Oat Bran cereal, Keebler's Soft Batch cookies, Pepperidge Farm's Goldfish crackers and Sunshine's Hydrox cookies, is prompted by health considerations -- and rising consumer pressure. Manufacturers have long been partial to the balmy-sounding vegetable oils -- coconut, palm-kernel and palm -- mainly because they impart a nongreasy taste and texture and extend the shelf life of products. But they are also high in saturated fat, the prime booster of blood-cholesterol levels. Coconut oil contains 92% saturated fat, palm-kernel oil 86% and palm oil 51%. In comparison, the damaging fat makes up only 27% of cottonseed oil, 15% of soybean oil and 13% of corn oil.

Consumer advocates have been campaigning in recent years to get companies to eliminate tropical oils. Last fall Phil Sokolof, founder of the National Heart Savers Association, fired the strongest salvo yet in the ongoing battle. He began placing full-page ads in leading newspapers lambasting U.S. food processors for "the Poisoning of America" and featuring photos of their offending products. Sokolof, 66, a building-materials manufacturer in Omaha who suffered a heart attack 22 years ago, has spent $2 million so far on his crusade. Says he: "People feel like they have been deceived by the food companies." Sokolof points out that Procter & Gamble's Crisco is touted as having no cholesterol, but it contains palm oil.

Although many of the manufacturers targeted by Sokolof are revising their products, they all insist that the changes were long in the works. Says Joseph Stewart, a vice president at Kellogg, which in December began replacing the coconut oil in its Cracklin' Oat Bran cereal with a blend of cottonseed and soybean oil: "It would be impossible to do the R. and D. and change our ingredients overnight." But he concedes that "Mr. Sokolof did create a sense of urgency for us to move faster."

Some scientists think the public has become overanxious. "The tropical oil issue is growing out of proportion," declares Basil Rifkind, a cholesterol researcher at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Roughly 15% of the calories in Americans' diets now come from saturated fats. And tropical oils supply only about a fourteenth of that amount. Americans might better worry about cutting back on the two biggest sources of saturated fat: meat and dairy products.

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York