>"high calorie" lards and beef fats on things like the fries, whereas today things use more "low calorie" vegetable oils. This is nonsense. All fat is high cal

>"high calorie" lards and beef fats on things like the fries, whereas today things use more "low calorie" vegetable oils. This is nonsense. All fat is high calorie at roughly the same rate, 9 calories per gram (unless there are other additives, like we find in butter and margarine). There might be a few percentage points difference in calorie per unit mass from fat to fat but this is negligible when you're talking about a class of foods that all contain around 100 calories per tablespoon. If you read the paper the linked article is based on, found here [0], fructose indeed appears to be the smoking gun that connects several different partially correct, but fragmented explanations for the prevalence of obesity in modern society. [0] - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0230 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.023... Edit - you also state below that hydrogenated soybean oil (margarine) has fewer calories than butter. A quick web search disagrees, putting hydrogenated soybean oil at 884 calories per 100 grams, margarine at 719 calories per 100 grams, and butter at 717 calories per 100 grams. I'm sure it all depends on the brand and processing techniques, but overall the concept of low calorie fat is hugely misleading. Otherwise we can compare butter to ghee and determine that butter is a low calorie fat, which is more nonsense.