Fortunately for us, high fructose corn syrup is only used in the US extensively as a sugar substitute. It has to do with a tariff against sugar imports, and government subsidies for corn farmers. I have a page about it on my website (http://www.its.caltech.edu/~farnswor/envsite/hfcs.html), and the wikipedia page is decent as well (link is at bottom of my webpage). FYI, soda in the US is made with high fructose corn syrup, whereas everywhere else it is made with real sugar. If you're a Coke/Pepsi/other soda connoisseur, you might notice a difference in taste drinking soda here vs. in the US.

As far as the transfat questions, one thing you can check for is "solid fat". Saturated fats are solid at room temperature, while unsaturated fat (better for you) is liquid. So, saturated fats have a longer shelf life. I think I saw an ingredients list for butter here that included a reference to solid fat, which is both disgusting-sounding and bad for you. Based on the French and Italian ingredients for the butter I actually bought, I can deduce that "partially hydrogenated" (synonymous for transfat) is "teilweise gehaertet" in German, and "saturated" is "gesaettigte". So, avoid those in the ingredients you find.

Also, this butter I bought will probably coat my arteries. Crap.