Butter in My Coffee: How a Dinner with an Old Friend Changed My Body, My Mind, and Everything This Chemist Thought They Knew About Food Paperback – April 4, 2026

We are 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 more physical capacity than 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.But recovery raised a harder question. If a dietary change costing nothing could reverse fifty years of damage that 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. It is 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. I spent decades following the guidelines. I got sick on schedule. And when I finally stopped listening to the institutions that had failed me and started listening to the chemistry, the damage reversed — completely, predictably, and in the way the evolutionary biology of the human body says it should.The story told here 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, at the molecular level, why they produce the diseases they produce.The United States now spends more than five trillion dollars a year on healthcare, more than half of it to manage chronic diseases that are, in the most literal and mechanistic sense, diseases of what we eat. Employer-sponsored insurance premiums approach twenty-seven thousand dollars per family. Pharmaceutical companies earn more than four hundred billion dollars annually selling chronic medications for conditions that, in many cases, reverse when the diet that caused them is corrected. This is not a system that has failed. It is a system working exactly as designed, optimizing for revenue at the expense of the health of the people it claims to serve.I am not asking the reader to trust me. I am asking the reader to read the chemistry, follow the citations, examine the incentives, and draw their own conclusions. More than forty citations to peer-reviewed research and primary public-health sources are provided. The argument does not depend on any single study. It depends on the cumulative weight of evidence that has been accumulating for decades while the institutional consensus has refused to move.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 you have been doing what the guidelines told you to do — 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.The system will not offer you this information. A friend offered it to me, across a dinner table, five years ago. This book is that dinner, expanded and documented, reaching toward you. Read more