Instinctively we know, butter makes everything taste better. This is a little-disputed fact, but after that everyone runs for the hills for fear of growing fat and dying of heart disease. You may recall I posted a few weeks ago extolling the wonders of bacon. Now it's time to learn why butter is good for you.
Allow me, once again, to dispel the common misconceptions about another of the most loved and feared foods on earth, and then you can decide for yourself to add a pat – or five.
BUTTER MYTH #1:
I eat Earth Balance because butter is loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol so it will clog my arteries and kill me.
FACT: The truth is, vegetable oils are more likely the cause of modern disease than traditional fats like butter, coconut oil, and lard. Think about it – these diseases have only come about since the invention of strange foods like corn oil, Crisco, and Earth Balance spread.
If you're a “show-me-the-studies” kind of person:
- Diets high in saturated fat actually have been shown to increase HDL, the “good” cholesterol and not affect LDL, the “bad” cholesterol (Journal of American College of Nutrition, 2004).
- Cholesterol does not clog arteries, and is essential for many functions in the body, including hormone production and regulation, proper digestion, and immune health.
- A fairly recent study actually shows that lowering cholesterol has no affect on plaque build-up in the arteries (American Journal of Cardiology, 2003).
The modern epidemic of heart disease should not be blamed on bacon, butter, and cream, but on unhealthy vegetable fats such as margarine, canola, corn, and soy oils as well as the groceries isles of other processed foods.
If you’re more of an experiential learner, start eating real butter regularly as part of a nutrient dense, junk free diet. Try to find butter made from cows that were raised outdoors on pasture. You’ll feel awesome and won’t die, I promise. At least not from the butter.
BUTTER MYTH #2:
Eating butter will make me fat.
FACT: I challenge you to sit down with a stick of butter and a spoon and see how much you can eat before your body says STOP! Chances are you won't get very far. If you make it through the whole stick, I doubt you could keep up this eating a stick-a-day going forward. But you might possibly eat a pint of ice cream or a chunk of cake daily if you gave yourself permission, right?
Eating anything in excess will make you fat, but the reality is, when you eat nutrient dense foods rich in saturated fat, your body will become satiated faster and for a longer period of time than when you eat a low-fat, nutrient deficient foods like non-fat frozen yogurt or plain, dry popcorn.
It tends to be the processed foods that make us fat because we can eat and eat and eat them and never feel satisfied for long, so we eat and eat some more.
Butter can actually be an important part of a healthy weight loss plan, as long as you limit the amount of junk food that you spread on and mix in with your scoop of butter.
BUTTER MYTH #3:
Yes, butter is delicious, but the USDA says saturated fats are “empty” calories. There's nothing nutritious in butter.
FACT: As a saturated fat, butter is an excellent source of fat-soluble vitamins that are crucial to good health, including vitamin A, D and K2.
Vitamin A benefits our immune systems and vision, while vitamin D helps build bones and aids in absorption of calcium. Vitamin K2 appears to reduce or even counteract plaque in the arteries. It also helps the body utilize calcium.
As the name suggests, fat-soluble vitamins are capable of being dissolved in fat. To reap the nutritional benefits of the vitamins, you need to eat animal fats – these nutrients (including vitamin A) are simply not available from vegetable sources.
The fat soluble vitamins in butter make veggies more digestible and make the vitamins they contain easier to absorb. It's actually important to add a dollop of saturated fat (such as butter) to your bowl of steamed broccoli!
The higher the quality of butter you consume, the more nutritional benefits you'll reap. Fat-soluble vitamins are more abundant in butter produced from animals that are grass-fed and exposed to regular fresh air and sunshine.
BUTTER MYTH #4:
I avoid butter because I'm allergic to dairy.
FACT: Most lactose intolerances result from drinking pasteurized milk. If it's a lactose intolerance that you suffer from, consuming small amounts of raw dairy can often reverse the allergy over time.
Many people who can't drink milk can eat cultured dairy products including cultured butters and yogurt. Cultured butter is produced when raw cream is inoculated with Flora Danica cultures, then left to culture before it is churned into butter. Even those who cannot tolerate raw butter may be fine consuming it once it is cultured.
For those with a casein allergy (to the milk protein), clarified butter or ghee is a great alternative and can be found online or in most well-stocked health food stores.
Humans have been thriving on and enjoying butter for thousands of years. Some cultures even revere the butter made from spring grazing cows as a sacred food. We instinctively know that we need butter (or some saturated fat) with our meals, though modern-day health-conscious folks do their best to stuff that wisdom. We have been hypnotized by commercials and government guidelines to believe that saturated fat is killing us, and instead we should starve our bodies of the evil – substituting the fancy-packaged by-products of modern agri-industry.
I don't know about you, but all this makes me scoop a bit more butter into my pan and onto my plate. Butter deserves an altar – go ahead, show some reverence for this sacred fat.
Right on! I’m studying about the benefits of butter right now because, while I can easily understand why real butter (the way God made fat) is better than some franken-fat, it’s hard to convince those around me when we’ve been taught to fear cholesterol for our entire lives.
Emily,
What butter brand do you recommend?
I recommend buy local if you can – Organic pastures has raw and cultured butters, Spring Hill Dairy (at the Sunday Santa Monica FM) has delicious butter from Jersey cows. In a bind, Kerrygold is available at Trader Joe’s and the cows are pastured (though the carbon footprint from Ireland is definitely much bigger!)
This is the best news I’ve heard all day.. No, all month… No, maybe all year. I’m a HUGE fan of butter. There really is no substitute. And I can’t wait to hear what you have to say about bacon. I grew up keeping kosher but now I’m obsessed with the stuff. Literally annoying people talking about how damn tasty the stuff is.
Emily, I just spent an hour looking through your site – it’s wonderful! Makes me want to live in Southern California and not Western Kenya. You’d think because we live so much closer to our food here that it would be easier to get more natural or whole foods but that’s not always the case. Our cows are happy and free range and eat “off the land” but too often that includes picking through garbage too. Anyway, local butchers are of questionable sanitation so I’m forced to get pre-packaged frozen meet and just hope that the US factory farming practices haven’t quite reached our part of the world. But it’s a struggle. Anyway, you’ve inspired me to at least try and find some raw milk, make my own yogurt and figure out how to get more pro-biotics in my life.
Miss you!
Kim
Hi Kim! Thanks – so glad you like the site. Such a surprise and bummer that you can’t get good meat. What about chickens and eggs? They must just roam around the ‘hood no? Let me know how it goes with the milk. I’d love to feature you guys and your food adventures in Kenya!
Raw, organic butter balances and harmonises your body ecology, promoting heart health, glowing skin and longevity. Eliminating fat from your diet is definitely not what nature meant for us. It is a nutrient that deserves its due just like all the others. Contrary to all the propaganda linking butter and heart disease, recent studies have concluded that you should indeed eat more real butter as it contains some vital nutrients that actually protect the heart. For more on how butter was wrongfully demonised please visit http://lovefitnesseducation.co…
You are exactly right. 😀
I was born in 1951, when there was very little processed foods, I used to eat a lot of butter, liver, meat, and cheese, I had clogged arteries in my heart when I reached 29 years, I stopped all meat, butter and saturated fat and am now 62 with 3 stents in my heart. So I have to disagree with butter and meats etc NOT causing clogged arteries. I will stay with my Fat free ice cream, and vegetarian diet. it has been working for 23 years now and I have gone from 185 to 160 pounds and have not had any problems..
Telling people what they want to hear doesn’t make it true. Bacon and butter are not good for you & the spike in heart disease & other diseases did not come about with the creation of “earth balance” but with the proliferation of refrigeration & our eating 10x more meat & dairy. Just because butter has a couple vitamins in it doesn’t outweigh the fact it’s a big glob of rotten cow mucus full of saturated fat & cholesterol. What ARE you talking about?
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