The Last Tango with Butter

A century ago, North American diets, like most traditional diets around the world, were healthy and balanced, and based largely on foods taken directly from nature. The intervening 100 years of meddling by scientists, industry and government have taken us on a long journey through excess and malnutrition, which are often to be found in the very same foods! Nutritional science is only now beginning to accumulate a critical mass of real understanding about the relationship between humans and the foods we eat. Science and traditional wisdom are realigning.The topics covered include the importance of saturated fats in our diets, and the harm their absence has caused, the body's need for cholesterol, and the overdose of omega-6 rich vegetable oils that is doing so much harm to our health. These are all examined in practical terms, placed in the context of the history of biased policy and science that have led us astray nutritionally, and explained in ways that shine light on the complexity of biology underlying good (and bad) nutrition. The book aims to demonstrate the wonderful way in which human biological complexities point us to the wide variety of natural foods, including all varieties of fat, that we should be eating.Melissa has written this book as a way of helping people find their way back to a healthy relationship with fat, by dispelling the myths and misunderstandings that have grown up about this precious source of nutrition over the last 50 years. The Last Tango is a pragmatic, concise overview of what all the fats we eat mean for our health, and sheds light on the essential role played by all the fats nature provides - including those long seen as enemies of good health. Eating fat isn't just 'ok' it's vital for our optimum well being.