HealthTeacher has announced a tool for finding trans fat content in everyday foods as well as foods from fast food chains. It’s available at HealthTeacher.com .

Choose a category of food (from baby food to vegetables — you can also search everything) and then choose a keyword. I tried all foods, and then searched for Twinkies. I got no results, so modified my search for Hostess.

I got one result. The results are a bit odd. The actual list is hyperlinked on the right. The nutrition information is in “label” format on the left. The one result I got (for “Hostess Ding Dongs”) contained all the nutritional information for the food item (not just trans fat) in an easy-to-read format. (Hey, did you know Ding Dongs have fiber in them?)

In doing some experimenting I found that I had better results searching for brand names (Burger King, Morningstar, etc.) than I did searching for just product names. The database is nowhere near complete, though — I couldn’t find any Boca products (vegetarian burgers and hot dogs) and sometimes the listings would seem incomplete (only Hostess Ding Dongs, for example. The only Progresso soups I could find were the healthy ones; the regular soups weren’t listed.)

Nice idea, but don’t expect it to be anywhere near complete.