Trans Fats
New studies add to these fats' image problem
Supermarkets are stocked with enough varieties of butter, margarine, and spreads to give a shopper pause. It’s no small task to decipher which sticks and tubs contain which types of fat—and which fats are best for your health.
The skinny on fat keeps changing. Whereas nutritionists first differentiated between just a couple types of fats, a subcategory of the forms that seemed less harmful later came to be seen as risky, after all (SN: 5/21/94, p. 325). Over the past several years, evidence has continued to mount against the food component called trans fat. It’s been implicated in diseases ranging from coronary heart disease to diabetes.