in support of butter

Okay, so the only shows I really watch are on Fox. I don't tend to have a lot of airing television on my weekly agenda -- currently just Bones (which is on the LONGEST HIATUS EVER, it hurts me) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Just enough to get a few mind-numbing commercials into my viewing diet.

There are a couple of commercials that bother me, though. First and always foremost, there are the Comcast ads, which in this backwoods area feature a Zen Buddhist monk and link Comcast cable to that amazing connection with the universe. I hate this kind of marketing. I loathe, abhor and detest stupid materialist commercials that shamelessly use a minority religion to push their products. Of course, really enlightened Buddhists shouldn't, according to their own philosophy, care about such things; so no one's made a big stink about it. But if someone used Jesus to sell AT&T, the nation would rise up in outrage. (Well, the Midwestern-Southern half, at least.) Why shouldn't we show other religions the same respect? Why can't religion be a tacitly understood "hands-off" subject for product advertising? I mean, come on. Ew.

But that's a rant for another day. Today's real rant concerns the second ad campaign on Fox that bugs me: "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."

First of all, I've never liked the brand name. I CAN believe it's not butter. It doesn't taste anything like butter. Now, of course, margarine products have been advertised since we were little kids, so I'm used to them, but the latest ad sports the saying, "Now You Know Better," and shows black-and-white mockups of 1950s families eating entire sticks of butter on their dinnertime potatoes, and then flashes full color to I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, with the "Now You Know Better" running across the screen.

Now You Know Better? About what?

This morning on Fox News one of the guests, who, I think, sponsors this Now You Know Better campaign, was talking about unhealthy trends that people used to think were great. Here's the list of things he mentioned, in this order:

1. Slathering yourself with mineral oil and going out to sunbathe;
2. Smoking;
3. Butter;
4. Insulating your house with asbestos.

Soooo...butter is right up there on the evil list with skin cancer, lung cancer, and cancer-causing asbestos.

Wait...what?

BUTTER DOESN'T CAUSE CANCER, folks. That bizarre grouping is like listing butterflies alongside Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. People love to tote butter's high cholesterol and high fat content, and link it directly to obesity, as though butter is solely responsible for the nation's weight problems.

Know what really makes people fat? EATING TOO MUCH. That makes people fat. Butter doesn't make people fat. And sure, people with really bad heart problems might want to stick to vegetable products; but butter doesn't signal your arteries to start building fat walls within themselves. Now, consuming entire sticks in a sitting, that's bad (and gross). But having real butter on your toast, or real butter on your baked potato, isn't going to kill you. It's not going to make you obese. It's not going to give you cancer. It's not going to cause a heart attack (unless you're teetering on the verge of one already). It's just butter.

I also hold the strange minority opinion that one of the best ways to eat healthily is to consume moderate amounts of well-balanced, all-natural products (as all-natural as you can get them). And I don't mean "all-natural" in the way the FDA does. I mean foods with ingredients that you can only find in the natural world, where man had no hand in tweaking or processing the chemical makeup. I tend to shy away from these freaky substitute products that people have come up with in the past hundred years, where the long-term results are as yet unknown -- artificial sweeteners are a biggie. But so are "vegetable spreads."

Do you really know better? Take a look at the ingredient list on regular Land O'Lakes butter. It contains two things: sweet cream and salt. The ingredients list on I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, or any butter substitute, is much longer, and includes hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils. We Grovers, if we dredge our memories enough, will come up with a few FitWell passages about the evils of hydrogenation. One of those evils: trans fats. Interestingly, incomplete or partial hydrogenation CREATES "trans fats"...and the FDA allows food producers to claim that their products contain "no trans fat," even if there are trace amounts of it within the products; the trans fat content just has to be below a certain percentage (according to Wikipedia -- fine, fine, yell at me for my sources -- if there is less than .5 grams per serving, you're allowed to call it 0). So margarines DO contain trans fats. They just don't have to tell you that. And trans fats have been implicated in heart disease just as much as cholesterol.

Yes, there are trace amounts of naturally occurring trans fats in dairy products. But evidently because they are naturally occurring, they are of a different (i.e. not synthetic) variety, and appear to be less unhealthy for you (though still not GOOD for you) -- and also occur in tiny percentages, as compared to the much larger percentages normally produced by the hydrogenation process.

Hydrogenation also transforms unsaturated fats into saturated or partially saturated fats; that's why margarines are solid at room temperature. So one of the criticisms leveraged at butter -- that it's a saturated fat, and those are bad bad bad for you -- becomes completely hypocritical from the margarine industries (which is why, I think, those blatant marketing bents have been disappearing. But the idea still lingers that butter has saturated fat and margarine doesn't. Wrong. Butter may have MORE saturated fat, but margarine's got it too). Oh, and let's not forget the kind of cholesterol present in margarines AS WELL as in butter: LDL cholesterol -- the "bad cholesterol." Since margarines contain saturated fat through the hydrogenation process, they also contain LDL cholesterol. Which is bad for heart disease.

So really, the only people who can claim their bread spreads are better for you than butter are the Italian restaurants who serve olive oil in its pure form for dipping. And if I have to choose between a fake saturated fat and a natural saturated fat, I'm going with the one man didn't screw around with, thank you very much.

Add to that the fact that the U.S. consumes much less butter than India, Germany, and France, and yet sports the world's biggest (haha) obesity problem, and you have to wonder, do you really know better? Is butter really so evil, just because a brand of margarine, attempting to sell itself, says so? If you moderate how much of it you consume, you're just as well off as if you use margarine, and you're also not putting into your body things that man-made processes have rendered artificial and potentially dangerous.

Besides, butter tastes better. The key, as always, is eating within a normal range of calories. If you do that, you can take a lesson from the non-obese French and eat as much butter or real cream or real sugar as you like...because in the end, you're not eating that much of it after all. And you'll have food -- real food -- that tastes like real food, and not hay.

So savor your butter. If you don't chow down on a whole stick in one meal, but limit your portions to reasonable amounts, why not go ahead and enjoy? Unless your doctor told you butter will kill you. Then you'd better listen.

Otherwise...it's just butter. And butter is just good.