Consumers Forced to Play Trans Fat Game.

Jul. 16--You knew doughnuts were bad, but Wheat Thins?

"Those are big-time culprits, those high-fat crackers," said Joan Carter Clark, a nutritionist at Baylor College of Medicine.

Last week's decision that packaged foods must include information on trans fats gives health-conscious consumers another tool for navigating supermarket aisles.

The Food and Drug Administration's deadline for the new labels is 2006, although Frito-Lay began changing the labels on its snack foods earlier this year, and other manufacturers are expected to beat the deadline, too.

The new rule doesn't apply to restaurants, even though Americans consume more than one-third of calories while eating out. People now eat out more than twice as much as they did in the 1970s -- an average of four times a week.

Many restaurant chains provide a total fat count of menu items on their Web sites, but few offer a…