I had this interesting question the other day. Someone had a file with two columns of data in it. They wanted to assign each column to a different variable and then take action using those two variables. Here's the example I wrote for them:

IFS=$'\n';
for LINE in $(cat data_file); do
    VARA=$(echo ${LINE} | awk '{ print $1}')
    VARB=$(echo ${LINE} | awk '{ print $2 }')
    echo "VARA is ${VARA}"
    echo "VARB is ${VARB}"
done

The key here is to set the internal field separator (${IFS}) to $'\n' so that the for loop iterates on lines rather than words. Then it's simply a matter of splitting the column into individual variables. In this case, I chose to use awk since it's a simple procedure and speed is not really an issue. Long-term, I would probably re-write this using arrays.