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.
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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.