Butter. The curse of the cholesterol-haters. Bad for you, right?

Wrong!

Made from heavy cream, butter is rich in cholesterol. It also contains conjugated fatty acids (with pairs of double bonds with only one single bond between them), which accelerate fat-burning and result in lower-than-expected weight if one looks only at calories and exercise.

Butter also has vitamin A, which helps the immune system and has other benefits.

If the butter is not burned, as by pasteurization, then it has the beneficial fragile fatty acids and other substances. Unpasteurized butter tastes good, too.

We need a good balance of omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids. The former as mostly in animal products, and the latter are mostly in plants. Avoiding animal products (as do vegetarians) can result in excess omega-6 relative to omega-3, a risk factor for arterial deposits and strokes, heart attacks, etc. It is easier and cheaper to determine the fatty acid mix by inquiring about diet than by getting a blood test, for fatty acid details are hard to assess and the tests are expensive. But the tests give better results. It's simpler to favor animal oils over vegetable oils.

Margarine, a competitor of butter, has yellow paint added and is often full of artificial fatty acids. Canola oil is a synthetic blend: there is no canola plant and the name is from the CANada OiL Association. Coconut oil is good for us, for it helps with weight loss and has fatty acids of medium-chain length. (Fatty acids have variable length in addition to various configurations of double bonds.) Flaxseed oil, though derived from a plant, has good omega-3 content. But overall, butter is our friend.

Do not worry about cholesterol in your food. Do try to avoid swallowing paint and other chemicals, whether called "margarine," "spread," "diet glop," or some other name.