We Don’t Know What To Eat
Why can’t science solve our most basic question of survival?
Growing up in Minnesota in the 1980s, my family’s kitchen was a scullery for healthy, common sense, midwestern eating. Children of a physician father and a nurse mother, my siblings and I were fed low-fat, low-salt, sensible portions of roast chicken and boiled potatoes, wild rice casserole, very well-cooked vegetables — and woefully deprived of fast food, Hostess snacks, and soft drinks (we called it ‘pop’).
And no butter for us; we ate margarine. Fleischmann’s margarine, to be precise. Every morning my dad would make a big stack of toast slathered with the stuff. And when I got home from school, I’d spread it on a stack of Carr’s table crackers as an after school snack. I’d guess we ate about a carton of margarine — 4 sticks — a week.
That carton was part of a massive amount of margarine consumed in the US. In 1983, Americans ate 2.3 billion pounds of margarine — twice as much as butter. We were all told it was better than butter — no saturated fats, no cholesterol. Much healthier.
It was all wrong.
Margarine of the day may not have had saturated fats, but it was packed with trans fats, an even more dangerous villain that packs the double whammy of raising LDL cholesterol (the bad stuff) and…
