Not so long ago, we loved butter. Whether it’s used as the base of fine sauces, melted over vegetables, or spread lavishly on toast and encrusted with cinnamon sugar, butter is the stuff of childhood dreams, the wistful fantasy of fat-deprived grownups. Now we’re terrified of the stuff and, for that matter, fat in any form. Somehow, we’ve taken a food that’s been universally consumed—even revered—and made it a culinary thug.

How, exactly, did this happen? What prompted, then tirelessly fueled, our extraordinary fear of fat? After all, this is the stuff that’s been used for most of our civilized history, since the first enterprising foodie discovered that vigorously shaking ewe cream rendered it a creamy, solid mass that was just this side of heaven. For hundreds of years, butter was used in everyday kitchens and well-heeled restaurants alike, without anxiety or shame. It just made sense: it came from cows, it tasted good, it made skillets slippery enough to flip eggs and flapjacks, and turned plain potatoes into a side dish of note.

Then came the relatively recent phenomenon of fat phobia. Around the middle of the 20th century, once modern sanitation practices triumphed over the assorted scourges and plagues of earlier years and people began living past the age of 50, doctors noticed a continued and disturbing increase in the incidence of cardiovascular disease. A theory evolved that eating cholesterol and fat caused heart disease, and researchers set out to prove this hypothesis. Studies emerged, and the sheer volume of research seduced news-hungry reporters. Starry eyed, they leapt on every new finding that supported the fat-causes-heart-disease theory like paparazzi racing after celebrities at the Academy Awards. With physicians admonishing them to cut back on fat, and media headlines fueling the fire, the public bounded on the fat-is-bad bandwagon. And the rest is history.

Big fat lies.
Over the next 50 years, in spite of countless conflicting studies, the following evolved: high cholesterol causes heart disease. In the medical community, this theory is called “the lipid hypothesis.” It has become more than a theory, however, and most people accept it as a hard, proven fact—even though researchers now believe oxidative stress (essentially, free radical damage) and inflammation are the causes of heart disease, and even though plenty of large studies refute the high cholesterol-heart disease link.

But studies are just studies, creations of artificial settings and manipulations of data. What if we asked a common-sense question: why would a substance we’ve eaten without incident for a large portion of recorded history suddenly be causing widespread disease? Is it because we’ve stopped exercising, so we’re more prone to obesity? Is it because we’ve dramatically increased our intake of processed grains and simple carbs, which prompts inflammation and raises blood triglyceride levels? Is it that we eat our saturated fat in conjunction with sugar and flour, rather than with vegetables? Is it simply that, thanks to modern sanitation practices and medical know-how, we now live long enough to develop heart disease?

Perhaps it’s because we eat fewer fruits, vegetables, nuts and fish, antioxidant-rich foods that can prevent the harmful effects of oxidized cholesterol, or because we no longer eat butter and other forms of saturated fat in their natural forms—as whole foods, unadulterated by hormones, antibiotics and pesticide residues. Or maybe it’s that, in many cases, we’re big fat pigs. We’ve lost a sense of moderation, forgetting to eat butter and meat and cheese—like everything else—in their appropriate quantities.
At any rate, after enough medical professionals bought into the “fat causes heart disease” theory, we were sold. Then, in a heroic feat of food engineering and utter disregard for common sense and aesthetics, fat-free foods were invented.

The unlikely forerunner of these was margarine. We think of it as a modern American creation, but the foul stuff was developed in 1869 by, of all people, the French. (Its creation came about when Emperor Louis Napoleon III offered a substantial reward for anyone who could make a butter substitute suitable for the lower classes). For many years, margarine was used as a cheap and admittedly inferior substitute for butter, not because of any purported health benefits.

As the fat-free craze spread, margarine gained enormous popularity in the United States. Butter bashers everywhere trumpeted its virtues, and we slathered the stuff on our bran muffins and high-fiber bread, swaggering with the misguided arrogance and self-importance of happily unaware toddlers.

Years later, of course, we learned that margarine was a primary source of trans fats, scary substances that caused LDL (bad) cholesterol levels to skyrocket and HDL (good) levels to plummet. In 2007, one large study reported that women with the highest levels of trans fats had triple the risk of developing heart disease. In a recent review in the New England Journal of Medicine, even small amounts of trans fats—1 to 2 percent of calories per day—were linked to a 23 percent increase in heart disease.

Fat facts.
Now, back to the whole fat question: what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s plenty? In general, fat-free diets are dangerous. Fats are crucial for a variety of body functions. They make it possible for us to digest, absorb and utilize fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. They’re sources of essential fatty acids, and they’re critical in nerve transmission, hormone production and maintaining the integrity of cell membranes.

Most food contains a combination of four major fats: saturated fats, trans fats, monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats. The real question is, what kind of fat should we eat, and how much? Some answers are easy: trans fats are the work of the devil, while the monounsaturated fats in olive oil, avocados and most nuts can be eaten with impunity. Other answers are more complex. The data on polyunsaturated fats is mixed, and the saturated fat debate is unarguably the most complex of all.

Lots of folks will tell you how much fat to eat, and what kind. The American Heart Association will tell you to limit saturated fats to seven percent of your daily diet, and to keep trans fats to 1 percent, but they won’t tell you how much polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fat to eat. A bunch of other experts will tell you to eliminate saturated fat altogether, or to limit polyunsaturated fat, or to eat more polyunsaturated fat, or to shun all fats except for coconut oil.

I won’t tell you anything about how much fat to eat. I think my job is to offer you some food for thought that may, perhaps, inspire you to your own research. In so doing, you might draw your own conclusions and make your own decisions, rather than relying on the opinions of experts who are, in the end, simply imperfect and fallible humans. In the words of Michael Pollan—author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an intelligent, insightful and deeply provocative treatise on what we eat—“I’m trying to take down the cult of expert eating.”
And yes, I eat butter.

Lisa Turner is a food and nutrition writer in Boulder, Colorado. She writes food columns for local and national magazines, teaches at Bauman College of Holistic Nutrition and Culinary Arts, and eats chocolate every chance she gets.