JJ Virgin4x NYTimes Best Selling Author, Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer

Is Margarine Still A Thing

21 Feb 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:48

In this monologue, JJ Virgin reflects on the persistence of margarine in modern diets, recalling his aunt who ate whole‑wheat bread with margarine and later suffered severe rheumatoid arthritis. He questions whether eliminating gluten and margarine could have helped. Virgin then describes his experience working at the Pritikin Center in the 1980s, where a low‑fat (10% of calories) vegetarian regimen was promoted to reverse heart disease. He wonders whether the observed health improvements were due to the diet, the intensive exercise, or the supportive community. Virgin critiques the current swing in public perception of fat—oscillating between fear of any fat (e.g., butter) and over‑indulgence—arguing that the diet that eliminates “crap” may not be sustainable long‑term. The talk highlights the confusion and shifting attitudes surrounding dietary fat, margarine, and health outcomes.

Chapters

Is margarine really still a thing? Is margarine really still a thing? I remember growing up, my aunt was considered to be a health freak. Now, I became a health freak at age 12, and I would look at her health freakiness, and it was health freakiness because she would only eat whole wheat bread with margarine. And I remember she got this horrific rheumatoid arthritis, like crippling, and they kept going, you know, Maybe if you just stopped the gluten and the margarine and ate some real fats. And she would like have none of that because she'd been so educated with it. I just didn't realize we still had margarine. Like, we still have margarine? How could this be that we still have— like, why? And in the '80s, we had this whole thing, and I actually was working at a place called Pritikin in Pacific Palisades, Southern California, where you were supposed to eat 10% of your calories from fat. It was basically a vegetarian place. 10% of your calories from fat. They were supposed to be curing heart disease. They were reversing heart disease. But what people were missing there is that maybe these people were coming in with such a bad diet, and they were putting them on this and having them exercise every day, and they would put them in there for 1 to 3 months and reverse things. I'm like, was it the diet? Was it the exercise? Was it community? Which one was it? And the diet that often can heal you because it's taking off of all the crap isn't necessarily the diet that's going to fuel you long term. So, you know, this idea now— I can't believe we're still worried about fat. It seems like we flip too. It's like we're either not eating fat and we're scared of things like butter, or we've gone completely to the point where we're putting like a stick of butter on our steak. Yeah, like