" Take the latest dietary guidelines. They recommend eating 25 percent to 35 percent of daily calories as fat and urge limiting saturated fat (found mostly in animal products such as meat and cheese) to 7 percent of calories, and trans fat (found in many fried foods and baked goods) to less than 1 percent."

" Now a new, Web-based tool could make it easier. This month, the American Heart Association unveiled My Fats Translator, part of an interactive site designed to help take the guesswork out of eating fat and encourage smarter fat choices. (In a bit of food irony, the initiative has been partly underwritten with an $8.5 million legal settlement from McDonald's. The fast-food chain was sued in 2003 for failing to tell the public that it had reneged on a promise to switch to healthier oils to cook its french fries.)"

" The goal is to "help people become aware of the type of fat they are consuming and to help them go out of their way to restrict trans fat and saturated fat," says Alice Lichtenstein, chair of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee and professor of nutrition at Tufts University."

" That's because both of these unhealthy fats are linked with an increased risk of heart disease, as well as other health problems. In March, National Cancer Institute researchers reported a link between higher fat intake and invasive breast cancer in older women past menopause. Women at greatest risk in the study, which was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, averaged 40 percent of calories as fat and ate the most saturated fat."

" To learn how many grams of fat you need to eat, go to AmericanHeart.org/FacetheFats and type your age, gender, weight, height and physical activity level into the My Fats Translator. It does the math for you. So a 45-year-old sedentary woman who is 5-feet-6 and weighs 150 pounds learns that she should aim for 1,910 calories daily and 53 to 74 grams of fat, including 14 grams of saturated fat and 2 grams of trans fat."

" Here's where the new tool gives answers using popular food as examples and then offers a few smarter choices in each category. It shows that a cheeseburger from a fast-food restaurant delivers 27 percent of the daily calories for that 45-year-old sedentary woman and provides more than a third of her daily fat, as well as a day's worth of saturated and trans fat. If she skipped the cheese and ordered a hamburger instead,
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