TRANSFAT — MORE BAD NEWS

Jodie Sinnema for
CanWest News Service

EDMONTON —

Everybody knows that eating a lot of fat — the wrong kind of fat — can cause a heart attack. That’s the bad news.

Now here’s the worse news: researchers from the University of Alberta have discovered foods rich in trans and saturated fats can also botch up the electricity in your heart, worsening the severity of heart attacks and increasing the risk of death.

For the first time, researchers have discovered that not only do “bad” fats affect the vessels of the heart, but they also affect the heart cells and can disrupt the rhythm of electricity flow in a heart.

The heart burns fat as an energy source to beat more than 100,000 times a day, but Light discovered bad fats stored in the heart cause an excessive build-up of calcium within heart cells. In normal hearts, calcium is pumped in and out of the heart each second with each wave of electricity.

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