Remedy for Health: Butter

It has become common knowledge that butter is one of the enemies of health along with all of the other so-called bad fats. Science has categorically proven it! But has it? Is there really the agreement that the health promotion advocates would have us believe? Perhaps good yellow butter has been demonized and isn't the enemy we have been lead to believe. Perhaps it could even be a remedy for health.

I was watching my 7 year old grandson as he prepared his breakfast on the morning his mother went to hospital for a minor operation. I asked him if he wanted butter on his toast. "Butter is bad for you," he intoned, "fat is bad for you." He had learned that at school and from the television.

"But you need fat," was my response. I told him that he needed good fat, like butter, for his brain and for every cell in his body. "Your brain is mostly fat," I told him, and you want your brain to function well. And every cell in your muscles has fat in them to keep the cell wall strong and healthy." He looked up with interest as it was quite different to what the teacher told him. But the teacher was only teaching what she herself had been taught.

I first became interested in the issue of fat when my colleague and professor found that some of the results from his research were quite different to what we understood they should be. So we went exploring the medical literature and I didn't stop when I kept finding results that were quite different from what we are being taught. Along the way I fell over discussions in the research literature questioning the common wisdom that highly saturated fats, such as butter, were bad for you.

It seems that there are very many more medical journal articles supporting having fat in the diet than finding it a problem. Well how can that be? Aren't they supposed to be scientists and follow the evidence? I tried having a conversation with a cardiologist at the university and I found out why this was not the case. He became so angry, very quickly. How dare I question what was definitely known to be true? It just showed how I didn't really understand research and therefore I shouldn't comment! This is not the case. I have done more research than he has over the years. His very fast move into anger was not unusual in the medical field. It was as if I was questioning a religious belief, a fundamental tenet of what it meant to be a health care provider.

This has been the finding of others as well. You only have to read the animosity filled responses to those who challenge medical religious beliefs. It is notable that they respond with sarcasm and ridicule and do not respond to the research findings with logic.

One of the academic journal articles I came across in my searching about fat was a review of the medical literature on fat by Ravnskov published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 1998. It is not new but it is controversial, because he did not come to the conclusion that the medical believers would have him come to.

Ravnskov reviewed over 100 publications that were supposed to be leading papers that show that fat causes heart disease. His review "included ecological, dynamic population, cross-sectional, cohort, and case control studies as well as controlled, randomized trials of the effect of fat reduction alone."

Basically it seems that there are around 15 times more studies that do NOT support the fat causing heart disease hypothesis. Ravnskov says "one cross-sectional study, three cohort studies, and one trial were unequivocally supportive whereas ALL (my emphasis) secular trends, more than 50 cross-sectional and cohort studies and eight trials were contradictory."

So what does that mean in practice? Well, for me, I have learned to be super-cautious when accepting medical doctrine. As a scientist I have to look at the evidence as a whole and be open to contradictory findings.

As a cook for myself and my family I have relaxed my concern about eating quantities of fat from range fed meats and eggs. I eat butter and olive oil most days and probably five times more in quantity than I did in my calorie conscious days when I was putting on weight at half a kilo a month. Much to my surprise when I have a higher meat fat intake then my cravings for sugar, breads and cakes reduced considerably and I've started to lose weight, rather than put it on. Whether the higher fat intake is the cause of that, I do not know. However it is a lovely coincidence.

There is certainly sufficient in the medical literature to suggest that saturated fats and butter in particular are not the demons they are lead to be. Butter contains much needed vitamin A in one of the most easily absorbed forms and other fat soluble micronutrients necessary for health. Butter is indeed a natural remedy for health.

Reference: Ravnskov, U. The questionable role of saturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids in cardiovascular disease. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 1998; 51 (6): 443-460