In other words, the best diet for our health depends, as it ever has, not on replacing trans fat with any one oil from any one nut up any one tree; but on seeing the forest.

Fresh food -- the stuff of life that nourishes, builds, and heals and that, with its rich abundance of nutrients, should make up the bulk of a healthy diet -- boasts a fundamental difference from its prepackaged and processed cousins: It is able to rot.

To reap the health benefits, I began eating canned sardines packed in olive oil years ago. I eat the contents of a single can nearly every day, but I recently discovered that the nutritional information I thought to be true wasn't accurate at all.

We can continue to push food companies to remove trans fats, and we can avoid them for now by knowing where they still lurk. A simple task to do when you are grocery shopping is to browse the ingredient list and check for the words partially hydrogenated or hydrogenated oil. Plain and simple.