By Anupum Pant
It’s hard to find real butter in grocery stores these days. Scan the aisles and you’ll only see spreads like “You won’t believe this is not BUTTER”, with butter written in huge letters, to deceive people into buying it. I somehow don’t like these. I can’t trust margarine to substitute my breakfast bread butter with it. Of course it has no cholesterol and has higher “good” fats. Today everyone is convinced enough by the fake food industry to consume margarine. Remember, the industry once told us that even cigarettes are good for your health. Could you really trust them after that? I still don’t like it and will never buy it. I trust the good old butter made from real milk. Even the worst real butter I think is better than margarine.
I could talk about Conjugated Linoleic Acid, Butyric acid, vitamin k2, fat-soluble vitamins and the Wulzen factor. But what’s better than a simple story which led to a genius newyork times best seller book called The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.
In the year 2000 Nina Teicholz, a journalist got a job at a small newspaper which offered her a great deal – Free meals. During this stint she ended up consuming good amounts of fatty foods like creamy soups, foie grass, steaks and what not. All the things that she had avoided for decades, and all the things that every diet book in the world had prevented her from consuming was being eaten in good amounts now. Surely, she must have gained 10 lbs and a whole lot of cholesterol after this, right? No, she lost 10 lbs and her cholesterol remained at the right levels.
From this revelation, she went into several years of investigation and discovered some amazing things that she has elaborated in her book. The whole debate of fake butter vs. real butter most definitely originated from a research study done by a pathologist Ancel Keys…
He compared the health and diets of 13,000 individuals from Japan, U.S and Europe. And concluded that people who consumed more of saturated fats in meat and dairy had high levels of heart disease, but the people who ate more grains, fish, nuts and vegetables did not. However, it is now clear that he cherry picked data to exclude countries like France where the food is rich in saturated fats and still hear diseases are relatively rare. A more comprehensive study which ensued, considered all the data and found that the culprit was sugar, not fat. It all started from this cherry picking of data to prove fat is bad. Similar thing happened with MSG, which led to a widespread belief that MSG was too bad a substance.
Also, read how some fats are just too good, and have exceptional health benefits, like whale fat.
more about it at [Time]