Here’s a story that is so scary and sobering that only a science fiction writer could make it up. Only it is not fiction.
And while a mere epidemiologist like me could not have conceived this story – it is too outrageous given what we know today – the story does provide us, and by us, I mean scientists including epidemiologists, media, and the public, at least several sobering lessons.
I love food history stories. They can be so informative. Here we go.
The butter part of this story started maybe 10,000 years ago, perhaps when some nomads put goat milk into a bladder, and as the nomads walked the bladder bounced around and churned the milk into butter.
Butter has been loved ever since.
The margarine story started in France in 1869. It was not love at first taste. Napoleon III wanted a cheap, hardy alternative to butter to send to sea with the Navy and to feed the bottom ranks of the working class. The resulting margarine didn’t work out for the Emperor. Neither the Navy nor the poor wanted it. But the idea of a cheap butter substitute was too good to throw away, and in 1901 a chemist invented partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil. Crisco, which was 100% partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil, came on the market ten years later in 1911, and by 1930 margarine was made with partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Let’s pause for a reminder. Partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil is a horror story of its own. It is toxic with trans fats, and trans fats can increase the risk of death by a third. 34% to be exact. Trans fats raise the risk of heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.
Nutritional epidemiologist Walter Willet and others found solid evidence that trans fats were bad for the first time in 1990. However, the FDA, with its cumbersome process combined with pressure from the ultraprocessed food industry, took until 2015 to revoke the GRAS, or Generally Recognized As Safe, status of industrially made trans fats, banning them from food only eight years ago, in 2018. And yes, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil can be seen as a very early poster child of the ultraprocessed food industry.
Back to our story, the butter shortages during World War II conditioned the American public to eating margarine, and the gap between butter and margarine consumption narrowed. In the post-war years, the margarine industry saw a bright future.
Convincing the public of margarine’s healthiness with biased-science and media
In the most audacious industry funding of research I know of, around 1945 the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers gave funding to three scientists at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois to compare the health effects of margarine versus butter.
That grant in itself was not audacious, but it might have been innovative. We think of industry funded research as part of the playbook written by the tobacco industry, which passed the practice on to the ultraprocessed food, opioid, cannabis, and gambling industries. But, in fact, this was a case of the ultraprocessed food industry funding research eight years before the tobacco industry started its massive effort in 1953 to co-opt the science linking smoking to cancer.
Of course, no matter who conceived of the idea of funding science to get advantageous and respectable-seeming results, or, in the case of tobacco, just to cast doubt on the good science coming out, the priorities were always the same, profits before science before health.
The audacious piece is what the Chicago scientists were paid to do. Previously all the research on the healthiness of margarine versus butter was done on animals, almost always lab rats. This grant was to do human research.
To put this in context, this money was delivered three years before German doctors were put on trial in Nurenberg for their concentration camp medical experiments on prisoners. This money came in the middle of the 40-year course of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study which withheld antibiotics from infected men who were Black. This was nine years before the NIH became the first institution to require a review of human subjects research it conducted. By the way, the NIH review program was only to provide itself legal protection, not primarily as a matter of ethics.
Here’s the thing. The doctors in Chicago were paid to conduct their research on orphans in two orphanages. One orphanage ate butter and the other ate margarine. The research went on for two years and was done on 350 children from 2 to 17 years old. They were weighed monthly and their heights were recorded, with blood draws to measure their red blood cell count and hemoglobin. Medical records were checked only to see if one orphanage was seeing a difference in health compared to the other. In their resulting paper the doctors seemed strangely excited the margarine eating children were much healthier than those that ate butter, although they took care to say in the paper that the very good health was certainly not “simply because” of the margarine.
It was a poor study with a poor design, written up with bias in favor of its funder, but of course the outrageous, nowadays unthinkable aspect is that forcing this study on these children was seen as acceptable. Children cannot give their consent to being subjects of research. Furthermore, these toddlers and kids and teenagers were wards of the state and in an institution where one might imagine they were experiencing some level of trauma or emotional distress on a daily basis. The margarine research equated them to lab rats with human metabolisms.
Having no consciousness about the possible harms of this research to its subjects paid off for everybody but the children. Especially the margarine industry, which saw a favorable paper, “Margarine And The Growth Of Children,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the world’s top medical research journals. The very influential TIME Magazine picked up the story, quoting the scientists’ conclusion that “Margarine is a good source of table fat in growing children…”
Within a couple of years as much margarine was being eaten as butter. Margarine continued to grow in popularity, becoming consumed twice as much as butter by 1970.
Today, Institutional Review Boards, or IRBs, in the U.S., or their equivalent in Europe and elsewhere, but not China or Russia, carefully screen all proposed research plans at universities or any organization doing federally funded research or FDA regulated trials, to ensure strict ethical standards are met. The margarine study would not have passed IRB review.
Are our problems with unethical research solved in the U.S.? Apparently not in RFK, Jr.’s department, home to the FDA, NIH, and CDC, three agencies that fund or review a lot of human subjects research.
At the end of 2025 it was revealed that the CDC had given a no-bid contract to Danish researchers to test the effect of hepatitis-B vaccines on newborns vs. 6-week old babies in Guinea-Bissau in Africa. The researchers are friendly with anti-vaxxers aligned with RFK, Jr. Kennedy has strongly praised one of the researchers. A leaked protocol for the study points to an intention on the part of the researchers to show that withholding the vaccine for six weeks is safer than giving it at the same time as other newborn vaccines. The World Health Organization is clear that withholding the hepatitis-B vaccine at birth is dangerous, risking the long-term development of serious illness and death due to transmission of hepatitis-B from the mother during birth. 18% of adults in Guinea-Bissau have hepatitis-B.
In sum, Kennedy disregarded procedure to give a contract to researchers who designed a study to exploit the high prevalence of a disease in an African nation. The leaked protocol revealed that their intent was to support the CDC’s dismissal under Kennedy of the hepatitis-B vaccine recommendation for newborns. There was no review by an IRB at the CDC of this research. The study has been decried as unethical by the World Health Organization and research ethicists and scientists, and it has been likened to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. As of March 2026 the study was on permanent hold.
While this began as a horror story about industry-funded, completely unethical research that found that margarine was as healthy as butter, again not true, we ended with another scary story of highly unethical research. Only this latter study was funded by a government politician, RFK, Jr., who happened to be in charge of a group of prestigious scientific agencies and yet had the goal of supporting his own dangerously wrong and unscientific ideas about vaccines.
