The quest for truth seems to be never-ending.
Although you wouldn’t know it from looking at me, I spend a lot of my spare time watching YouTube videos about the existence of God. Some people who seem really smart — a lot smarter than me — make the case that God doesn’t have a long white beard or sit on a throne, even though Michelangelo provided considerable evidence to the contrary.
Some even argue that God doesn’t exist at all. That science exists, instead. These are the atheist scientists who also claim that there’s no such thing as heaven or hell.
Nevertheless, I sometimes worry I will end up in hell, as punishment for watching these atheists on YouTube.
There’s a particular type of video I’ve purposely been avoiding: the ones that discuss butter.
We’re all confident that butter truly exists, and that it’s made from cream, although in this day and age, you never can tell how things are made.
When I was a kid, my family hardly ever bought real butter. We used margarine instead, but we called it “butter”.
Given a choice between margarine and real butter, I have consistently chosen margarine, because butter was going to end up giving me a heart attack someday. That’s what the scientists told me. Even though butter tasted better, I listened to the scientists.
But times change, and the latest scientific truth — not to be confused with the previous scientific truth — is that margarine is probably bad for you, and it’s probably better to eat butter.
Five years ago, the Mayo Clinic posted a video on YouTube claiming that margarine was the better choice.
But then we heard this from the National Institute of Health (NIH) website:
The idea that saturated fats cause heart disease, called the diet-heart hypothesis, was introduced in the 1950s, based on weak, associational evidence. Subsequent clinical trials attempting to substantiate this hypothesis could never establish a causal link. However, these clinical-trial data were largely ignored for decades, until journalists brought them to light about a decade ago.
Subsequent reexaminations of this evidence by nutrition experts have now been published in more than 20 review papers, which have largely concluded that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality or total mortality.
I wish this conclusion had been revealed 30 years ago. We might have suspected the truth, however, considering humans have been consuming butter (happily) since at least 5,000 BC. I think the Bible would have warned us about butter, if it was really dangerous.
And it only makes sense. Butter is made from cream, which is made from milk, which comes from female cows, who eat grass. Grass is one of the most harmless things in the universe. We should have known all along.
But sometimes the chemical companies that produce stuff like margarine have the ability to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
I’m now more comfortable watching YouTube videos about “margarine vs butter” — now that I have some scientists behind me — and it’s starting to sound like margarine contains some really bad stuff. Like Potassium Sorbate? Calcium Disodium EDTA? I don’t think those chemicals even existed when the Bible was being written.
From NIH:
The current challenge is for this new consensus on saturated fats to be recognized by policy makers, who, in the United States, have shown marked resistance to the introduction of the new evidence. In the case of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines, experts have been found even to deny their own evidence.
We will note that some of these scientists and experts, who are refusing to accept the truth about butter, are the very same scientists who tell us that God doesn’t have a white beard.
I now feel pretty sure I won’t end up in hell, from eating butter.
On a related note, there’s a product you can buy in the grocery store called “peanut butter”. I tried it, and it tastes nothing like regular butter. Why they even call it butter, I have no idea.