Butter in My Coffee: How a Dinner with an Old Friend Changed Everything This Chemist Knew About Food

If the only answer you've been offered is a drug that quiets your appetite for as long as you keep paying for it, this book asks a different question.We are chronically sick on a scale no other society has ever managed, and the advice we have been given is making it worse.At 66, I was obese, in chronic pain, and foggy-headed. Fifty years of back pain. Decades of joint inflammation that was slowly robbing me of the use of my hands. A gallbladder removed, a cervical fusion endured, a career's worth of fatigue I had learned to call normal. I was doing everything the dietary guidelines told me to do.Five years later, at 71, I have as much physical capacity as I had in my twenties. The weight is gone. The pain is gone. The fog is gone. I did not take a medication. I did not have a procedure. I changed what I ate.Recovery raised a harder question. If a dietary change costing nothing could reverse fifty years of damage the medical system had been managing for decades, what had the medical system actually been doing? I am a physical chemist. I could not leave the question alone.This book is the investigation that followed — an accounting of how the dietary advice that governed American eating for seventy years was constructed, who profited from it, and what it did to the bodies of the people who followed it. The story is both personal and systemic. It names names. It follows the money. It traces the specific chemistry of the substances that now dominate the American diet — the refined seed oils, the ultra-processed carbohydrates, the additives for which the safety testing amounts to self-certification — and explains the molecular mechanisms by which they drive disease.The United States spends more than five trillion dollars a year on healthcare, most of it managing chronic diseases that are, in the most literal and mechanistic sense, diseases of what we eat. This is not a system that has failed. It is a system doing exactly what its incentives reward.If you are carrying weight that won't move, pain that won't resolve, fog that won't lift, or fatigue that won't break — and if the only answers you've been offered are a prescription and a lifetime on it — this book is written for you. It will not tell you what to eat. It will tell you what I learned, how I learned it, and what five years of sustained, measurable recovery looks like on the other side of ignoring an entire industry's worth of bad advice.A friend offered me this information, across a dinner table, five years ago. This book is that dinner, reaching toward you. Read more