Diets certainly are different now. In my childhood home, I’m talking the early to late ‘60s, chicken was served on Sundays, roasted whole or cut up and fried. Today, at my grownup house, the freezer is packed with chicken, and you’re likely to find just a couple of small steaks individually wrapped so my husband and I can share one for dinner. Even if I could get a gorgeously marbled Delmonico for a buck and a quarter, steak would still be a treat. The truth is, we know too much now about saturated fat, cholesterol and cancer.

But are we healthier?

I posed the question to Nagi Kumar, the director of Nutrition Research at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa. Her answer, without hesitation, was, “No I don’t think so.”

She cited television’s Food Network, where Emeril Legasse gets a round of applause for cooking anything in bacon fat. And Paula Deen’s liberal use of butter is rivaled only by my beloved Ina Garten’s use of heavy cream. We know it’s bad for us, but, somehow, we can’t resist.

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