My grandmother cooked with ghee. My mother was told to switch to refined oil. I grew up with refined oil, then in my twenties was told that ghee was good after all and the oil had been the problem.
Two complete reversals within one family in about fifty years. Both were oversold at the time, and the pattern is more interesting than either conclusion.
This is a description of how the advice moved, not nutritional guidance. Anyone making decisions about their own health should be talking to somebody qualified.
What the original case was
The mid-century shift away from traditional fats came from research linking saturated fat to blood cholesterol and cholesterol to heart disease.
The chain of reasoning was plausible and parts of it hold up. The dietary advice built on it was much more confident than the underlying evidence supported, and it was implemented as a broad public message rather than as a nuanced one.
What people actually did in response was substitute. Traditional fats out, industrially processed vegetable oils in, and in many households a substantial increase in refined carbohydrate to replace the calories.
That substitution was not what anybody intended and it is a large part of why the results were disappointing.
What the rehabilitation actually said
The reassessment over the last couple of decades has been considerably more cautious than the popular version of it.
The broad direction is that the relationship between saturated fat and cardiovascular outcomes is weaker and more complicated than the original message implied, that what a fat is replaced with matters as much as the fat itself, and that whole foods behave differently from their isolated components.
What it did not say is that any quantity of any traditional fat is beneficial. That leap was made by people selling things and by a general appetite for a story in which the old ways were right and the experts were wrong.
The actual scientific position is closer to "this is less clear than we said" than to "we were wrong in the opposite direction", and those are very different statements.
The quantity problem
The thing that gets lost in both versions.
Traditional cooking used ghee in quantities that were constrained by cost and availability. It was expensive, it was made at home in limited amounts, and it was used deliberately.
Ghee is now cheap, industrially produced and widely available, and the enthusiasm for it as a health food has led people to use it in ways nobody's grandmother did — in coffee, by the spoonful, in far greater volume.
Which means the rehabilitation of a traditional fat has been used to justify a pattern of consumption that is not traditional at all. Whatever the evidence says about ghee, it does not say that about a great deal more of it than anybody previously ate.
What has actually changed in my kitchen
Modestly, which is probably the correct response to a modest evidence shift.
I use ghee where it does something a neutral oil cannot — where its flavour is part of the dish, in tempering, in anything where the traditional version assumes it.
I use neutral oils where the fat is a cooking medium rather than a flavour, which is most frying.
I use less total fat than the enthusiastic version of the advice would suggest and more than the low-fat era would have.
And I stopped treating the choice as a health decision at all, which is the change that has affected my cooking most, because it lets the flavour question be the question.
The smoke point argument
Worth addressing since it is the one genuinely practical consideration.
Ghee has a high smoke point because the milk solids have been removed, which makes it suitable for high heat cooking in a way that butter is not.
Many refined oils also have high smoke points. Some cold-pressed and unrefined oils have low ones and degrade when overheated, producing both off flavours and compounds nobody wants.
This is a real and checkable property, unlike most of the rest of the argument, and it is a better basis for choosing a cooking fat than the health claims in either direction.
What I take from the whole episode
That confident dietary advice aimed at whole populations has a poor track record, and that the confidence is generally the part that turns out to be wrong rather than the direction.
That what a food replaces matters as much as what it is, which is the single most useful idea to come out of the reassessment.
And that when a traditional food is suddenly declared healthy, it is worth asking who benefits from that message, because the answer is frequently somebody with a warehouse full of it.
Making it at home
A practical note, since the homemade version is genuinely different from most of what is sold.
Butter simmered until the water cooks off and the milk solids at the base turn golden, then strained. Twenty minutes, and the flavour depends almost entirely on how far you take those solids.
Taken to a light gold, it is mild. Taken further, to a deep brown, it develops a nutty character that is what a lot of people mean when they talk about proper ghee.
It keeps for months without refrigeration because the water is gone, which is the original reason it exists in hot climates and the part of the story that is entirely uncontroversial.