Healthy eaters are being warned about dangers of saturated fats. Yet there is now a new bad fat - trans fats.
Recent research highlights that these new fats make you put on weight around the stomach, even if you are on a diet .
This abdominal fat can be dangerous as it pumps out chemicals linked to getting heart disease and diabetes.
Trans fats also increase LDL (bad cholesterol) in the blood and lessens HDL (good cholesterol). They also inflame and harden arteries.
Some specialists state that trans fats are worse than saturated fats. The Consumers' Association suggests reducing consumption of such fats can decrease UK heart disease related deaths by 25%.
However, the irony is that trans fats do not have to be listed on ingredient labels, hence, it's difficult to work out which foods have them.
So what exactly are trans fats - and what can we do to guard against them if they're pretty much invisible?
These fats exist in many foods that are processed, like cakes, biscuits, pastry and margarine to ensure their long life .
The only way in the UK to check if a food contains trans fats is to look for the label 'hydrogenated vegetable oil' or 'hydrogenated fat'.
