There’s a new Trans Fat Free Crisco. Thankfully, it has not yet made it to all the grocery stores across the country, and some of you wouldn’t think of touching it even if it had. It’s made with sunflower oil, soybean oil, and “fully-hydrogenated” cottonseed oil.

According to lipid scientist Mary Enig, total hydrogenation produces only saturated fats, but these are usually as hard as a brick, and are “softened” up through a process called “interesterification.”

Interesterification involves the rearrangement of the fatty acids on the glycerol molecule or modification of the fatty acid composition to give new properties to a fat or oil without using hydrogenation. Enig says that restructuring through interesterification, which can be chemical or enzymatic, involves several solvents including hexane, a relative of gasoline. In the vegetable oil industry, such manipulation of lipids is referred to as the field of “structured lipids.”

I would avoid this new generation of Crisco and go back to butter and lard—the traditional fats of our ancestors. Another new "structured" oil on the market to avoid is Enova.