Eating butter is ok, but too much margarine could kill you!

Trans fats were tied to a 34 percent increase in the risk of early death, and a 21 percent increase in coronary heart disease.

The idea was that by cutting down on saturated fats, you lower cholesterol levels in the bloodstream and so reduce the build-up of fatty deposits in the blood vessels to the heart. The industrial trans fats were especially problematic when it came to the risk for coronary heart disease and death by coronary heart disease (42 percent and 18 percent increased risks, respectively).

Several reports since 2010 have confirmed that saturated fats are not associated with heart attack or stroke, said Dr. Ronald M. Krauss of Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California, a coronary artery disease expert who was not part of the new review. Trans unsaturated fats, or trans fats, are made from plant oils and are used in margarine and various packaged backed and snack foods. Saturated fats, on the other hand, which come from meat, butter, eggs, and some vegetable oils, did not have such associations.

Trans fat intake was associated with an increased risk for all-cause mortality and CHD; however, consuming saturated fats did not appear to influence risk for mortality, CHD, CVD, ischemic stroke or diabetes, according to recent data. “There may be other potential mechanisms”.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given food manufacturers until 2018 to remove trans fats from the food supply, she told Reuters Health by email.

The lack of a link between saturated fat did not surprise researchers, as they write in the study, published in the British Medical Journal, because previous studies have not found it to be linked to colon or breast cancer.

So while trans fats might be worse than saturated fats, we don’t eat much of them anyway, and it is for this reason that saturated fat is considered a greater risk simply because we eat far more of the stuff.

“Eating well means replacing those saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats rather than carbohydrates, particularly refined and processed carbohydrates, which is what usually happens”, she added. It concluded that saturated fats are one of the main building blocks of many cellular structures in the human body and should be consumed in reasonable amounts.