Eating a lot of artificial trans fats for a few weeks makes your body produce more of a chemical that shows your fats are being damaged by stress, like rust forming on metal.

Taking CLA supplements for a few weeks may cause more damage to fats in your body, similar to how trans fats do, based on a chemical marker in urine.

Eating a lot of trans fats for a few weeks slightly lowers one inflammation marker and raises another, but doesn’t change most others — so its effect on inflammation is small and mixed.

Even though trans fats are bad for your heart, they don’t seem to make your body’s general inflammation much worse — so something else, like cholesterol, might be the main reason.