Muffins

I have a muffin recipe that I have used for years.  It requires vegetable oil and no butter.  It is a tasty recipe and I have made many variations--apple muffins, blueberry muffins, raspberry and banana muffins, walnut strawberry banana blueberry muffins.  I have considered them to be fairly healthy.  I have been reading a book, however, that has been turning around my ideas about healthy.  For example, is vegetable oil really better than butter?

Nina Planck published Real Food as a way to talk about diet and her experience with what she calls, unsurprisingly, real food.  To Planck, real food is unrefined food that has been eaten in traditional diets for hundreds of year.  Hunter-gatherer and early farming societies used the food resources they had.  Only in the last century or so have we had so many refined food choices.  Wonder Bread is not real food, but whole grain bread made without preservatives and other refined chemicals is real food.  White sugar is not real food, but honey is.

She talks about fats and oils as well.  She has found that the least healthy fats are the ones we have been led to believe are the most healthy:  refined vegetable oils.  The reason is not simple, but essentially, those who eat primarily these oils as their main fat source (we all need fats in our diet to be healthy) have more health problems that those who eat "traditional" fats, such as butter, olive oil, coconut oil and lard.  These traditional fats provide the good stuff we need from fats, while the refined oils provide nothing we need and also increase the risk of heart and other disease.  Polyunsaturated oils, like corn, soybean and sunflower oils, actually increase health problems.  The villains, saturated fats--butter and lard for example--provide essential ingredients such as Omega-3. 

So my muffins might be better off with butter.  Michael Pollen recently wrote an article in the New York Times where he argued that our breaking down food into its parts has ruined food for us.  We don't enjoy food for what it is--a source of sustenance and pleasure.  We think about it too much.  We went from meals as social and family events to food as math exercises, where we count calories and grams.

The basic advice from both these authors is this:  eat a well-balanced diet with food that is processed as little as possible.  This means considering the source of things like eggs and meat--are they from a factory farm or a farm where animals are healthy and therefore are a source of healthy food?  Eggs from chickens that roam freely and can eat grubs they dig up will provide more nutritious eggs than chickens crammed into small cages who never see the sun.  The good eggs cost more but provide more.

So don't worry if you eat butter, but eat good butter, from grass-fed cows.  But here is the catch:  eating food that is more healthy is more expensive.  Those who can afford it have a better chance of eating well.  Those who prioritize healthy food choices do as well.   If enough people considered the real sources of their foods, and made purchasing choices based on what is most healthy, we all would be better off.  My concern is that few people consider where their food comes from.  Or if they know, they pretend it does not matter.

It is easier to live in ignorance than to make choices that take more effort.  Even if that effort is just asking questions.  One of my latest questions is this:  Should I find another muffin recipe to memorize?  It might take a little effort to find one, but I at least need to look.