What foods are safe?

The world and research constantly is changing its opinions on what foods are safe to eat.
The most recent change has come with the rehabilitation of butter.
Back in the 1950s, very few people were fat. Most households in Fort Frances had very rich milk, where the cream would separate from the milk.
If left out on a cold January day, the cream would burst through the seal of the glass milk bottle that the milk man had left earlier in the morning on your doorstep.
We ate lots of bacon and eggs back then, and moms cooked up big chunks of fatty beef nightly for supper. The fat from the pot roasts swam through the vegetables that surrounded the meat and made them even tastier.
We played outside from morning until night and we all were healthy. Very few children and adults were fat.
Then researchers started publishing alarming stories that parents were providing long-term harm to their children with the foods they were serving. Whole milk was banned, being replaced by skim or one percent.
I went on a milk strike—refusing to drink the diluted milk when it came into our home.
My mother also began replacing butter with margarine for cooking. Meanwhile, we were concerned that eggs should be limited in our diets because the cholesterol was toxic and would clog our arteries.
We were encouraged to modify our diets. We were encouraged to eat more chicken, move to smaller portion sizes for beef and pork, and choose grass-fed beef over grain-fed meat.
We moved to more pasta suppers and “Hamburger Helper” became a staple in every household.
Now having followed this “healthy diet” for more than four decades, health officials now are worried about the sudden rise in obesity and diabetes.
Statistics in the U.S. tell us that two out of every three American adults is overweight or obese, and one-third of those aged six-19 are overweight or obese.
Here in Canada, every year we see a growth in obesity numbers in our population and today almost one-in-two adult Canadians is overweight or obese.
Could it be that those healthy food choices that were proposed are, in fact, harming the population?
A study that began in the late ’50s found that those following a diet low in saturated fats had reduced cholesterol levels over the group that had their normal diet.
Fast forward half-a-century. It now has been discovered that those in the study who followed the diet low in saturated fat died younger than those on the regular diet.
Did the studies show that government and healthy food guidelines make us fat? Did sugars, grains, and foods high in carbohydrates that we adopted to replace our old diets make us fat?
We don’t know, but we are not thinking that we should have more dairy butter in our diets.
Maybe the “Everything is Better with Butter” campaign had real meaning.