Comment Re:Why Not Ban Fried Food? (Score 2) 851
It's not as simple as "butter is good for you", but here is a decent link:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ma...
I'm not sure what you've been eating instead of butter, but if it's margarine, by all means ditch the stuff and buy a pound of butter. Margarine is full of trans fats (or at least, it used to be), and while most nutrition studies are full of caveats and qualifications, it really is pretty damn near universal that the trans fats are just horrible for you. Margarine makers have been switching away from trans fats for some years, precisely because of this, though this announcement is the final nail in that coffin.
The actual healthiness of butter is still heavily qualified, so we don't really know. The biggest problem, as always, is calories: high-fat foods (deep fried or otherwise) make it really easy to consume more calories than you need. Eaten in moderation, with half an eye on the bottom line (you don't need to count if you have a bias towards mimimizing the junk), you can go ahead and eat pretty much whatever you like, in small amounts.
We still don't really have a good handle on exactly what is "healthy". Many people thrive on a variety of different diets, some of which include fried foods. There is no magic bullet; removing saturated fats didn't turn out to be it. (The history of that is complicated and ugly, involving some really horrific biases and conflicts of interest.) The real consensus is that if you eat a diverse diet with a very large proportion of vegetables and your body will not begrudge you the occasional deep-fried treat. The rest is too murky for specific advice, especially since most people aren't even following that simple plan, so it's hard to optimize further.