Picture this: You. A thick juicy grilled-to-perfection steak. And a fork and knife. Mmmm... And a little party crasher inside your head howling: Fat! Fat! Saturated fat! Marching into your arteries setting up camp! Hmmm. There’s nothing like breaking down a food into its biochemical components to take the fun out of eating. But according to new research you might be able to silence that internal nagger once and for all. “Butter Is Back ” screamed recent headlines in the New York Times; “Eat Butter ” proclaimed Time magazine. Is this return to fat a real reversal of decades of conventional wisdom or merely a new swing in the ever-oscillating pendulum of scientific research? And how do we Jews measure up on a report card of healthy diets?   The Good Bad and Tasty The food of our grandparents’ childhoods replete with greasy kugels and chicken shmaltz was like most of the traditional cuisine at the time heavy on the fat. “Fattening up” was considered a positive thing as it demonstrated that you had enough to eat; the skinny and scrawny raised alarms of malnutrition. When President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955 the issue of heart disease was thrust into the national limelight. Nearly half of all deaths in the US at the time resulted from heart disease and to add to the fear very often the heart attacks happened suddenly with seemingly no advance warning to men in their prime. A spate of scientific research followed and by the 1970s the results were in: cholesterol was the villain and cholesterol was produced by a diet too high in saturated fats. 

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