DEAR DAME EVELYN , Everywhere I turn these days, I seem to find myself reading something about how awful trans fats are. Or trans fatty acids – I assume these are the same thing. Part of their evil seems to be that they turn up in all sorts of crackers, including my beloved Club and Ritz crackers. I am desperately looking for someone to tell me that things aren't really as bad as all this media mania seems to imply – that trans fats will kill you if you so much as touch them, and that they are everywhere, in toothpaste and skim milk and lurking under mattresses. I am putting my faith in your irrepressible ebullience, not to mention your boundless wisdom. Please don't let me down. Please tell me I am not living in trans-fat hell.

Boxed In

Dearest, As you have cleverly surmised, Dame Evelyn, in her ebullience, is always ready to speak up for fats – fats are life, and certainly taste! – but you are also quite right in your nightmarish suspicions about trans fats. They are everywhere, practically, and they are terrible for you, as manufactured food "products" so often are. Trans fats, which are vegetable oils that have been "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" – an infernal process that adds hydrogen atoms to the natural oil molecules – so as to be solid rather than liquid at room temperature. Trans fats are, chemically, a bit too close to plastics for Dame Evelyn's taste and health. Margarines and Crisco are two rather pure and obvious examples of trans fats, but trans fats are more widely, if less visibly, used than that. If you are eating something crispy out of a paperboard box or a plastic bag, the likelihood is that it has been sullied with trans fat. My advice is twofold: (1) stop eating it, whatever it is, and throw it out; and (2) start reading labels. If you see the word "hydrogenated" (not to be confused with "hydrolized"), move on. The good news, which as an irrepressibly ebullient person I am of course thrilled to add, is that big food companies are starting to dump trans fats, so reading the labels of your beloved boxed crackers won't necessarily be, forever, a dispiriting exercise.

Spiritedly, E.G.-S.