All About Food:

It seems that everything good is bad again and vice versa. It’s very hard to know what’s healthy these days as we are constantly bombarded with contradictory “scientific” studies about the food we eat. Have you given up butter, chocolate and red wine? It turns out to be a bad idea. On the other hand, delicious and ubiquitous balsamic vinegar now carries a lead warning, and it seems that beautiful summer peaches absorb the most pesticides.

We want to give you an update, but we cannot promise that it won’t be out of date by the time you read this.

Let’s begin with butter. All natural, creamy butter was a staple in everybody’s diet until margarine appeared on the scene — cheaper and supposedly healthier because it was made from vegetable oil rather than animal fat. After World War II, people were using more margarine than butter and feeling virtuous about it.

Then came the trans-fat exposé and everybody switched to fake butters like “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” Unlike margarine, these products do not contain trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils), which raise bad cholesterol and lower good cholesterol. So then, people switched to the faux butters and once again felt virtuous.

Alas, recent scientific evidence has called into question the method of turning these vegetable oil products into solid form. The big word for this is interesterification. In margarine, a hydrogen atom is added to the molecular fat chain, whereas with interesterification the fatty acid molecule is scrambled.

This chemical cookery has recently come into question because of a university study published in Nutrition and Metabolism that found these manipulated fats actually “…do more to lower HDL (good cholesterol), depress insulin and raise blood sugar than highly saturated palm oil, which was one of the tropical oils driven out of the food supply by the pro-margarine campaign.”

There’s more research to be done, but in the meantime, many people are advocating that we just go back to butter but use it judiciously.

Michael Pollan, award-winning food writer, in his new book, “In Defense of Food,” says, “Don’t eat anything that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize.”

So which would you rather have, a baby aspirin or a piece of dark chocolate? Baby aspirin has been touted as a healthful addition to a daily regimen.