Fat lot of good

Take a good look around your fridge. Almost certainly somewhere between the tomatoes and last night's left-overs there's a tub of low-fat butter, a few diet yoghurts, a carton of semi-skimmed milk. Keeping them company there may well be reduced-calorie chicken tikka, a "light" cheese spread, even a diet chocolate mousse or two. If you fancy a beer with your curry, there may be a bottle of `lite' lager chilling nearby. With 40,000 Irish people currently on the Weight Watchers regime, it is safe to assume that many more Irish people are also trying to reduce their fat intake. And food processors are proving only too happy to oblige. Elva Lawler, marketing manager with Heinz Ireland, says their Weight Watchers From Heinz range, first introduced here in 1992, is a "boom business" and now numbers some 17 different frozen ready meals. There are also WWFH salad dressings, baked beans, ice-creams and cheesecakes.

According to Duncan Graham, Marks & Spencer's food manager for the Republic, the most popular lines in its rapidly-expanding Healthy Choice range are the low-fat sandwiches, followed by the Indian and Chinese dishes. "It is certainly one of the areas where the most product development is happening," he says. However, Darina Allen, best-selling food writer, teacher and TV chef, is scathing about this fastest-growing sector of the food market. "I wouldn't have them in my home. I wouldn't feed them to my family. I wouldn't feed them to my friends. I wouldn't touch them and I think people are just being conned," she says. "There's a difference between a low-fat diet and a diet of `low-fat' foods."

She passionately claims that the very things that make food satisfying are taken out in the production of "diet" foods. "Take the diet breads. You eat five slices of it and you're still not satisfied, while if you have one slice of really good bread you're full."

So are food manufacturers jumping on a bandwagon and cashing in? Are we being exploited by cynical businesspeople who are suddenly labelling even pasta, rice, cereals and sugar, which never were and never will be fatty, as "low-fat" products? Should we be worried about what the processors are putting into the food to make up for what they take out?

Margaret O'Neill of the Irish Nutrition and Dietetics Institute cautions against getting carried away with low-fat and "diet" products. "We advise people to go for the low-fat dairy products like yoghurts, milk and cheese. However, with the mayonnaises and the chocolate biscuits, just because the manufacturer puts a low-fat label on some, they may be lower in fat, but they are still high in fat," she says. "Just because the biscuits have "diet" on the pack is not a reason to have four or five instead of one or two. Moderation is the approach we always stress."

She also points out that because some of the fat has been removed, there may be large amounts of sugar, so the product may still be high in calories. And where fat has been spirited away, fat substitutes will almost certainly have been introduced. A look at the names of some of these may be enough to put some readers off their whole-grain toast and low-fat spread.

Where once was lard may now be micro-particulated protein, modified whey protein concentrate, cellulose, dextrins, hydrophilic colloids, insulin, polydextrose, Amalean, Salatrim, caprenin, Olestra, Sorbestrin, dialkyl dihexadecylmalonate or even trialkoxytricarbyllate. Mmmmm.

Some shoppers The Irish Times chatted with over the afternoon shopping trolley, however, were happy enough to take their chances. Mary Masterson, from Rathmines, was buying McVitie's Go-Ahead Chocolini biscuits - 55 calories each compared with 88 calories in regular chocolate biscuits. "I'd buy the low-fat biscuits, yoghurts, milk, though I don't like the prepared meals," she said.

June Moore was on her way over to the Healthy Choice range in Marks & Spencers when we caught up with her at the "30 per cent Less Fat" crisps. "We all try to keep an eye on the fat. I'd grill rather than fry . . . I'm going to get the Chicken in a Black-Bean Sauce, I think."

In most cases these products are more expensive than their normal counterparts. For instance, in one Dublin supermarket, Irish Pride 100 per cent wholemeal bread was selling at 57p for 400g, while Irish Pride Light was 61p for just 300g; Heinz's regular baked beans were 41p a can while the Weight Watchers variety was a penny more, and Mitchelstown's reduced-fat cheddar was selling at £6.19 a kilo, but its regular cheddar was £5.99 a kilo.

Despite such concerns, the professor of nutrition at Trinity College, Michael Gibney, says there is no harm in "low-fat" and "reduced calorie" foods, that they do have value and, despite their detractors, they are in growing demand. On the labelling of foods that always have been low-fat as "low-fat", he says "the consumer is pretty thick, to be honest" and that there is value in having healthy choices highlighted. "One of the biggest barriers to people reducing their fat intake is the thought of giving up the foods they like. If they want cod mornay or chicken korma and cut down on fat, and the food industry can give it to them, there's no point in saying that the world should be another way, that people should re-educate their palates. The foods aren't hurting them, so leave them alone to eat them," he says.

On the plus side, he considers that the growing awareness of the fat - and fibre and folic acid and mono-unsaturates - in food has been a valuable dividend of the food industry's admittedly market-driven efforts. "The reality," he says, "is that if the consumer has a problem and the industry can solve it, it's going to." And so, he concludes, the demand for foods to make ourselves smaller is just going to get bigger and bigger.