I saw a video talking about how nature will reject a block of margarine, like bugs and stuff won’t eat it. But if you put a stick of butter out it will be eaten in hours. Is that just an unsubstantiated internet claim for controversy sake, or is that really the case?
Later, I read somewhere that recent studies found regular users of butter experienced reduced levels of cancer compared to regular users of vegetable oil. I don’t have these studies, but I’d also like to know if that’s a truthful claim or not as well. Thanks.
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Scientific data is very easy to cherrypick. There have been a great many studies on a great many things and statistics can be used in such a way that you can interrogate a particular data set to make it say basically anything you like if you’re good enough. Imagine just flipping through a library and picking out all the ones where the villain is called Dave, and using that to prove that all people called Dave are evil.
I do not know how true the first claim is. Butter and margarine aren’t expensive so it’s something you could do yourself if you wished. Be aware that animals eating things is not a measure of it’s nutritional impact – the slugs in my garden will devour Basil instantly but won’t touch Rosemary. This doesn’t mean rosemary is toxic in any way to humans.
Studying human nutrition is incredibly hard because we eat so much, and we’re terrible at remembering what we ate, and unlike mice you can’t just lock groups of people up and feed them one thing. To really prove butter doesn’t cause cancer but veg oil does, the gold standard would be to get one very large group of people to only eat butter, and one very large group to only eat veg oil, and another very large group to consume neither. This is impossible. Instead we typically look at big groups, ask them in a survey “What did you eat yesterday” and generalise that what they ate yesterday reflects their whole diet. Foods typically get bucketed into large categories; e.g. butter would go in “Dairy”. Scientists then do statistics until they find some interesting pattern.
You must be **very** skeptical of *anyone* making any claims that “X causes Y” because very often it hasn’t been demonstrated in humans. It might cause something in a worm, or a cell, or a mouse, but they’re not people.
Certain things, we have unequivocal proof they do cause cancer in real people living their lives – the Sun, alcohol, asbestos, and so on. These things have decades of absolute proof in real people, and a firm mechanical basis. Other things, like, infamously, Aspartame, we have some mechanical reason to suspect it *can* cause cancer, but we only see it occur in models when given unrealistic exposures or only under specific experimental conditions.
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