Pastured butter is a great way to get healthy animal fat.
A case in point is the fat tax. The idea is that you can make people thinner by heavily taxing the purchase of foods containing the "ultimate evil" - animal fat. This truly bad idea was tried in Denmark in 2011. A tax ranging as high as twenty percent was placed on foods containing saturated animal fat, like butter and cheese. The Danes did not reduce their consumption of these foods at all, often buying them from other countries. After a year of total failure, the Danish government admitted failure and abandoned this stupid, tyrannical tax.
Yet medical voices in the U.S., completely aware of the Danish failure, are still calling for a fat tax in America. A tax that would have to be high enough to stop people from buying foods containing animal fat.
Reducing the consumption of healthy animal fats will make people malnourished, not thinner
The basic idea behind the fat tax, that forcing people to eat less fat will make them thinner, is just not true. A huge campaign to reduce the eating of animal fats has been waged in the U.S. for over fifty years.
Americans eat much less saturated animal fat than they used to, which is the goal of the fat tax. And what is the result of this "success"?
- Americans are much fatter and sicker than ever before.
- Seventy five percent of young Americans who try to join the military are rejected as physically unable to serve.
- Chronic illness, especially among young people, has greatly increased.
- The U.S. spends far more money on medical costs per person than it did before fat restriction was advocated.
The truth is that fat from healthy animals is perhaps the most needed and vital food we can eat. (See The Skinny on Fats.) Restricting this vital food only results in malnutrition, and the illness that it brings.
Americans are suffering greatly from malnutrition, due in large part to not getting enough healthy animal fats. Taxing animal fats will only make this worse, and make food even more expensive, making it almost impossible for the poor to get the nutrition they need.
Eat healthy animal fats, lose weight
Before fat was demonized, doctors treated obesity by prescribing a diet high in animal fats. These diets worked, and nobody needed a diet industry. This fact has been carefully concealed by various industries, which thrive on sickness and people trying to lose weight.
The solution to obesity and illness is not to intensify the same methods that made the problem much worse, but to make it easier for people to afford and get the nutritious traditional food they really need.
An educational program teaching people the truth about food - that the unmodified foods of our ancestors is what we need to be strong and healthy - would greatly increase the demand for such food, which people already crave. Subsidies should be stopped to industrial farmers and chemical makers, and given to sustainable farmers who raise real food, to increase the supply. People who give up factory food and eat only real food almost always become much healthier and happier. I have seen it happen time after time, with my own eyes.
Factory foods are far inferior to real food, and chemicals in food can do great harm. True health and normal weight come from real food, the food of our ancestors. That is the only proven solution to the problem, and we should take it.
People have a right to choose their food
It is a basic human right to decide what food you will eat, and how much. No one has the right to make that decision for you. Not the government, not the corrupt medical profession, not the greedy food industry, not anybody or anything. Many people make horrible food choices because of propaganda and misinformation. In my experience, when people actually learn the truth about food, they change what they eat and become much healthier.
Education is the answer, not coercion.
It is trans fat laden vegetable oils that cause obesity and not animal fats (unless put through a hydrogenation plant). Obesity cannot be discussed without discussing trans fats, neither can dementia, CV disease or diabetes. This is firmly established in the scientific literature.