Pass the margarine, please.

Has someone sent you this email recently? That one with the scary stuff about margarine being bad for you and you might as well eat plastic? Well here's a great response to send your well meaning friends:

Ya know, a simple Google search and about 10 minutes of researching the results and you will find that a lot of this is not true and this email has been circulating for 7 years. When it was written, it was not known that the thing that made margarine bad was the trans fatty acids contained in it. Since that time, most margarines and other food items (like french fries) have been reformulated to not contain trans fats. Margarine today can actually have much less fat than butter, containing no bad trans fats, and never did contain bad cholesterols; in fact some margarines made from healthy oils can actually reduce your cholesterol! A good margarine by all accounts is probably much healthier than butter (and you can find actual scientific studies to support this).

Also, its simply not true that margarine was invented to fatten turkeys. Its also older than 100 years.. in fact it was invented expressly as a butter substitute over 140 years ago. In fact pretty much every statement in this email is just plain false.

And comparing it to plastic because its one molecule different.. come on. Learn some basic chemistry and you will discover all kinds of things that have very similar molecular structures but are completely different in practice. This means nothing! Hell, Water is only one *atom* away from being Hydrogen Peroxide, should we stop drinking water?

A much more useful thing is not be irrationally afraid of any one particular thing, but to understand that as with all things in life, moderation is key! Too much of anything is bad. If you are eating so much margarine and other fats, sugars, and such things that we all know aren't particularly good for you, then your not saving yourself by switching from margarine to butter; your real problem is that you are simply eating too much bad stuff! Moderate it.

This seems like a really great example of the common phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" -- which itself is a very misunderstood quote which is paraphrased from the following:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again"

So the next time you get one of these scary sounding reactionary emails, do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes to research it, learn a bit more, don't just accept everything you read, and don't just forward it along and propagate nonsense.

Personally, I just learned a few things about margarine that I didn't know before. And I will continue eating small amounts of it because, frankly, I like margarine!