Dairy fat‑-the kind that comes in butter, milk, and cheese‑-is saturated, plain and simple. So if you want to spare your arteries, you need to switch to (trans-free) margarine, fat-free or low-fat milk, or reduced-fat hard cheese.

But you've also got to watch the sour cream you spoon onto your baked potato, the ricotta you tuck into your lasagna, the cream cheese you use for your Sunday "schmear," and the cheese spreads that grace your crackers. Each can pack a wallop of heart trouble. Here's how to dodge it without disappointing your taste buds.

Sour Cream
Two tablespoons of full-fat sour cream deliver three grams of saturated fat. That's 15 percent of your daily limit of bad fat. But all the fat-frees we tasted were bland and not very creamy (Cabot Vermont and Daisy are the best of the bunch, though they taste more like plain yogurt).

Solution: try a reduced-fat (like Breakstone's) or a light (like Friendship, Land O Lakes, or Cabot Vermont). They cut the sat fat from three grams to two or 1 1/2 (in two tablespoons). But blindfolded, you could easily mistake them for full-fat.

If you can find Vermont Butter & Cheese Company Fromage Blanc, you're in business. The company has figured out how to turn fat-free milk into something that tastes exactly like rich, full-fat sour cream.

Cottage Cheese
A bowl of cottage cheese with sliced bananas, blueberries, or peaches is a classic. But half a cup of regular, full-fat cottage cheese (the label will say 4 percent milkfat) chews up three of your 20 grams of saturated fat for the entire day. Why bother when you can get away with half that much in an equally creamy 2 percent milkfat cottage cheese? Most companies make one.