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

You were probably told it was your fault. The weight that won't come off. The fatigue. The aches, the fog, the slow decline you were told to accept as the price of getting older. Eat less, try harder. If you've done everything right and gotten sicker anyway, some part of you already knows that story doesn't add up.

I believed it too. I'm a physical chemist, and for decades I trusted the same dietary guidelines and medical advice as everyone else — while my health came apart. By my mid-sixties I was obese and failing: fatty liver disease, arthritis, digestive trouble, chronic fatigue, mental fog, and back pain I'd carried since high school. I was doing everything I'd been told to do.

At 66 I changed the way I ate. Within a year I lost 70 pounds. The fatty liver disappeared. The back pain went. The fog lifted. The arthritis in my hands eased. The prescriptions stopped. Five years later, at 71, I take no medications and have had no procedures. When a single change reverses that many conditions the medical system had treated as separate, a chemist has to ask whether they were ever separate at all.

That question began over dinner. An old friend told me his own recovery had started with a conversation we'd had more than twenty years earlier — one I couldn't remember having. A seed I'd planted without knowing it had changed his life, and now he was handing it back to me. That dinner sent me back to first principles. I stopped asking what the guidelines said. I started asking what the chemistry said.

This is not a memoir, and it is not a diet plan. It is an investigation. Butter in My Coffee follows the evidence through human evolution, food chemistry, agriculture, industrial food processing, nutrition politics, and healthcare economics — and through the quiet way health knowledge often travels: from one person to another, across a dinner table. It examines the incentives. It follows the money. It traces the chemistry of the refined seed oils, ultra-processed carbohydrates, and additives that dominate the modern American diet, and explains the mechanisms by which they help drive metabolic disease.

Inside, you'll find:

• Why human metabolism may not work the way modern nutrition advice assumes.
• What refined carbohydrates, seed oils, and ultra-processed foods do at the chemical level.
• Why obesity and chronic disease may be driven less by willpower than by metabolic dysfunction.
• How government policy, industry incentives, and medical economics shaped the food system we were told to trust.
• What sent one chemist back to first principles — and made him question nearly everything he thought he knew about food.

This book will not tell you what to eat. It will show you what I learned, how I learned it, and why the official story stopped making sense. It does not ask you to accept another expert's opinion. It asks you to follow the evidence.

You were not the problem. The advice was.

A dinner with an old friend changed my life. This book is that conversation, passed on.