And yet another nutritional study reveals that we don’t know anything and have to make mistakes telling people something is bad for them for years in order to figure out we were wrong in the first place. Apparently it takes on good study based on good science to disprove years of bad studies based on “bad science” (fueled by the desire to condemn everything that tastes good as bad for you). Saturated fats were never bad for us. Butter was never bad for us. Margarine turned out to be world’s worst. And our biggest regret is not putting more butter on our toast all these years.
It seems nutritional studies have been next in popularity to celebrity gossip ever since the industrial revolution when we actually started to suffer through choosing what to eat. In the face of a million new food choices, we needed help choosing. But prior to industrialization we didn’t have all those choices and we ate butter. We ate it all the time and we were fine. In fact, we survived for centuries eating butter (in reasonable amounts).
Here’s the deal; butter and all other unadulterated dairy products (by unadulterated I mean dairy products that haven’t had the fat removed) contain fat soluble vitamins that exist in the fat because there is fat. So whole milk and butter and full fat yogurt are natural, to use the word in its simpler sense. When the fat is removed (such as in skim milk), one removes the naturally occurring vitamins that need fat to exist. And common practice is to re-insert these vitamins mechanically afterwards. It’s a shame that we’d go through so much trouble to make naturally fatty foods like whole milk and cheese that taste so good (fat’s purpose being to be tasty and satiating) taste worse.
Applying this logic, butter contains many fat soluble vitamins such A, E, and K2. Butter contains now harmless saturated fats versus margarine which contains trans fats which are seriously so bad for you. Butter tastes good and we should eat it primarily for this reason. Could Paula Deen have been right all along? (disclaimer: allusion is for rhetorical purpose, we don’t actually think Paula Deen is a reliable source of information on nutrition considering the exorbitant amount of sugar she uses in her recipes likely contributed to her diabetes).
And after thirty years of what now seems like counterintuitive nutritional advice, we are finally reclaiming the nutritional advice of a pre-industrial culinary history that was based on the simple concept of eating things that were more or less a direct by-product of nature. Nutritional science has certainly made many important advances, but it has also served to complicate nutrition in the minds of the ordinary food eater. The moral of the story is you can finally have your butter, eat it, and feel good about it too.
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