Butter

Being a World War II baby, I spent the first fifteen years of my life on food rations. It is said that we are the "lucky" generation: Many unhealthy foods like sugar, bacon, pork, beef, milk, butter, fat, cakes, and even bread were strictly rationed. Meanwhile, we could eat as much as we liked of cabbage, onions, and turnips!

As a rule of thumb, oils that are solid at room temperature are suspect, as they are almost certainly unhealthy saturated fats. Examples are butter, lard (including bacon fat) ...

Replace butter and margarine with “Green” spreads.

in 1942, the USDA issued a new food guide that reduced the number of food groups to what they called the "Basic Seven." These were: green and yellow vegetables; oranges, tomatoes, and grapefruit; potatoes and other vegetables and fruit; milk and milk products; meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dried peas and beans; bread, flour, and cereals; and butter and fortified margarine.

With the creation of the "basic seven", several changes were made from the 12 food groups in the family food plans. "Potatoes and sweet potatoes" have been lumped in with "other vegetables and fruit." "Eggs" and "dry beans, peas, and nuts" are lumped in with "meat, poultry, and fish." The "butter" group has been expanded to "butter and fortified margarine." The word lean has been dropped from the category "lean meat." The "other fats" group and the "sugars" group have disappeared entirely.

Many primitive societies eat snails and their shell-less cousins, the slug. The idea to some minds seems grotesque, yet they are a valuable, easily collected source of food. In fact snails have been commonly raised and eaten in the Middle East and Europe for thousands of years. The French, of course, have made a national dish out of snails: "escargots" cooked in garlic and butter are even considered a delicacy. Snail and slug flesh conforms to the Savanna Model, although the French recipe is not ideal nutritionally.

The unhealthy properties of milk fat are now mostly accepted. We are told that fat-free milk is good for us and it is even better to stay away from cream, butter, and ice cream. For many years now, the connection between these foods and high cholesterol, heart disease, strokes, and hardening of the arteries has been well known. Scientific findings show that dairy consumption from any source (cow, goat, sheep) and in any form (including skimmed milk, cheese, and yogurt) is associated with a number of serious, slow-acting diseases, including osteoporosis, high cholesterol, cancers, allergies, heart disease, and obesity. The notion that dairy products cause osteoporosis is so contrary to conventional nutritional dogma that it needs solid justification.

There are dozens of fatty acids, most of which are either neutral or harmful to health. Saturated myristic acid and palmitic acid are aggressive to arteries. They are particularly found in butter, cream, cheese, beef, pork, and lamb. Palmitic acid is also the chief component of palm oil, which is used in processed foods. However, the body converts another saturated fat, stearic acid (particularly found in cocoa butter), into oleic acid (as found in olive oil). Oleic acid, which dominates the family of monounsaturated fats, is neutral on the body. Olive oil is "good" because it does no harm.

The fat from goose and duck is semi-liquid at room temperature, which tells us that there is not much saturated fat in it. The fat of these birds has a high percentage of monounsaturated fat. This seems to be one more element helping to explain the French Paradox— the people of Toulouse use these fats in preference to butter, thus increasing their intake of monounsaturated fats.