Welcome Back, Butter, We Missed You

Go ahead, spread butter on your toast without guilt. And don't be so obsessed about removing every last bit of fat from that pork chop. At long last, the nation's misguided notion that all fat is evil is losing its credibility, writes Mark Bittman in the New York Times. Even better, the "real villains in our diet—sugar and ultra-processed foods"—are getting the scorn they so deserve. All these years, Americans might have been doing more harm than good in substituting, say, margarine for butter, and all because the supposed experts told to us to avoid saturated fats. They were wrong.

"The tip of this iceberg has been visible for years, and we’re finally beginning to see the base," writes Bittman. How does it translate into what we should eat? Focus on real food—an actual piece of fruit rather than a fruit rollup—instead of the food-like substances that populate the supermarket aisles. If it didn't exist a century ago, be skeptical. Meat? Fine, but eat less of it and avoid the industrially processed stuff. And, of course, "you can go back to eating butter, if you haven’t already," writes Bittman. Click to read his full column. (More butter stories.)