Ben Greenfield argues that butter was wrongly demonized by agricultural interests, replaced by fragile seed oils and margarine that damage your body when heated. Saturated fats actually build cell membranes and hormones.
How should people think about butter again? I grew up. It was evil. Butter clog your arteries and it's going to kill you. Ben Greenfield says what There was a very almost like, politically driven movement back when all that vilification of saturated fat occurred because we had a lot of monocropping of soy and wheat and other compounds that we could eventually turn into oil, particularly rapeseed or canola. And we also had the emergence of a lot of these synthetically produced fats like Crisco, margarine, etc. In the years since then, we've come to find that canola oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil and the like is incredibly fragile and when heated or when put under pressure, creates what are called free radicals that have the ability to be able to just rip apart the membranes of your cells. Matter of fact, if somebody came up to me at the county fair and offered me, like a stick of cotton candy or a corn dol, I'd always take the cotton candy 10 times out of 10, because that's just sugar, right? I can go for a walk around the fair, maybe go for a ride and scare myself, maybe go do some bench pressing or whatever, and that sugar is in and out of me. But whatever oil that was used to soak and fry that corn dog is going to be what my body uses to make its cell membranes for about the next three months. That's why vegetable oils are such a problem. And when you combine that with the fact that a lot of the harder oils that have been created synthetically, like Crisco and Margarine, have a lot of trans fats, in which we've now found are one of the most horrific things that you can put into your body for cardiovascular health. Dictates that the vilification of saturated fats was really unfortunate because these saturated fats got replaced with highly unnatural synthetic fats and oils that aren't good for the human body. And furthermore, what we found is that most people can handle and actually do very well in terms of the way they build cell membranes, the way they build hormones and things like testosterone and healthy cholesterols and estrogens. Those satur saturated fats are incredibly important for that.
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