Last year I read Fat, a celebration of flavor (a cookbook) written by Jennifer McLagan.  A few days later, I tried the sage butter sauce recipe with pasta:  Fry 30 fresh, whole sage leaves in ½ lb. butter on medium heat for about 10 minutes, just until the butter begins to brown and the leaves turn crispy.  Meanwhile, boil ­­­3/4 pound of pasta (I used fettucini) in salted water and drain when done.  Pour the sauce over the cooked, hot pasta and serve with a simple green salad and some fruit.  I added steamed beet greens to the pasta as well.  Dinner was heavenly.  The sage turned from a tangy, sharp, fuzzy herb into something much softer around the edges.  Its gentle, flavorful crunch, next to the chewy, slippery pasta, was unbelievably satisfying, and we ate nothing more that evening — no popcorn, no chocolate, no ice cream. 

One-half pound of butter?!  Absolutely, I tell my patients.  Fat is your friend.  Because we have been indoctrinated with the opposite message, I usually have to say it a few more times.  Fat is your friend.  One hundred years ago, before we had medications for diabetes, the ONLY treatment for diabetes was a high-fat diet.  Fat is dense with nutrients, vitamins, and, most of all, flavor.  Even a small portion is extraordinarily satisfying.  The low-fat, no-fat message is part of America’s diabetes and obesity problem.  We need fat, and we’ll get it wherever we can if we don’t get it where we ought to.  The “French paradox,” the observation that the French remain slender despite the large quantities of butter and cream in their diet, is only a paradox if you believe that fat is not your friend.  There is no paradox.  Fat is your friend.  Good fat, that is.

You already have a frame of reference for such a thing as good fats.  You have probably heard about the good fat in olive oil, dark chocolate, nuts, and fish.  Maybe avocados, too.  What do these fats have in common?  How is one to tell the difference between good fat and bad fat?  It’s easy — good fat is found in nature.  Good fats were here before us.  Butterfat is one of my favorites, and it’s a particularly nutritious food as well, in part because it contains an unusually diverse collection of fatty acids.  These fatty acids serve as building blocks for the ceaseless repairing and remodeling that happen inside us all our lives. 

Any way you slice it, margarine is not butter.  Most margarines are made from hydrogenated soybean oil.  The word margarine is related to the hebrew word for pearl, margalit.  Margarine comes out of the machine colored pearly gray.  My mother, born in 1936, remembers when “oleo” was sold with a tiny bead of red food coloring that she and her grandmother kneaded into the gray, waxy material to turn it a more palatable yellow color that was meant to resemble butter.  In those days, the dairy lobby was more powerful than the soybean lobby.  Now it’s the reverse.

Synthetic fat products like margarine, Crisco, hydrogenated fat, coffee whiteners, and refined oils are found not in nature but in machines.  They are food-like, but they are not food.  We may put them in our mouths, but they do not sustain us.  One way to identify products that are not really foods is by their names.  Instead of being called by names our great-ancestors would have recognized (like butter, broccoli, or peanuts), they have fanciful names with healthful, pseudo-scientific, old-fashioned, or playful connotations that are meant to evoke all kinds of feelings including, but not limited to, hunger.  Margarines constitute one category of products with these creative names.  Smart Balance (seesaw), Blue Bonnet (granny), Promise (not), Country Crock (pickles), Benecol (bene=good, col=cholesterol), and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (why not? we just told you) are not foods.  Your great-grandma would have told you the same.