For years we’ve been told butter causes heart disease and makes you fat. But did you know that butter has some pretty impressive health benefits?

In Defense of Butter

First off, yes, butter is high in saturated fat. Secondly, THAT’S OK. Because now we know that saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease. That’s another topic for another time, but take a look at The Lipid Hypothesis and The Framingham Heart Study for more info about this.

Butter is high in cholesterol, but that’s ok too because you need cholesterol to synthesize hormones and for structural repair. Eating more cholesterol will not raise your cholesterol unless you have hereditary hypercholesterolemia. Read more about cholesterol here.

Butter’s Health Benefits

• Butter is high in antioxidants, beneficial fatty acids, and has immune-boosting properties.
• The fatty acids in butter are good for brain health.
• Butter is a great source of fat soluble Vitamins A, D, K and E which are best absorbed from eating butter (you need fat to absorb fat soluble nutrients),
• Butter contains butyric acid, which is a short chain fatty acid that feeds your colon cells.
• Butter and other saturated fats like coconut oil hold up very well to high heat cooking, meaning it’s a very stable fat and its healthy components remain intact. Other fats, such as monounsaturated (olive oil) have weaker bonds that break down at high temperatures and become damaged, which creates arterial damage in your body over time. This is why you should never expose the delicate polyunsaturated (flax oil) fats to heat and save olive oil for medium temp cooking. Use saturated fats (solid at room temp) for high temperature cooking.

How to Choose the Best Butter

As with everything, use butter in moderation, and rotate its use with other good fats in your diet, such as coconut oil, olive oil, ghee. Choose organic butter from grass fed cows, because it has a much better and more natural fatty acid ratio–one that has not been tinkered with via grain-fed cows, victims of factory farming. Grain is not the cow’s natural diet. I like Kerrygold.

Choose cultured butter if possible. It has an even better nutritional profile.

The Problem with Fake Butter

I just saw a commercial for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, so I went to their website just to see what sort of ingredients they’re trying to mystify me with. Aside from the tub, it comes in sticks, too! Convenient for baking and can be subbed for butter in your baked goods. Are y’all using this stuff? Wow. Let’s review.

Here are I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’s ingredients:
Vegetable oil blend (including Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Canola Oil, Liquid Soybean Oil), Water, Lecithin, Diglycerides, Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid, Artificial Flavor, Retinol Palmitate, Beta-Carotene

They vary according to which product you choose; there are light varieties, Mediterranean blends, sprays, tubs, squeeze, fat free, etc etc. Hold the phone here, folks. If you get nothing else from reading my website, please take one thing away with you: EAT FOOD. FOOD COMES FROM NATURE. This product IS NOT FOOD. It comes from a lab. Partially hydrogenated oils may cut down on saturated fat content in a food, but they are a laboratory-engineered product that has been altered to yield results on a label in congruence with what we’ve been led to believe: that fat is the enemy.

Better yet, on the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter website, they have a link you can click to learn “The Big Fat Truth” about butter. This link takes you to another website, sponsored by Unilever, which is a huge multi-national food corporation that manufactures none other than margarine and other fake butter products. The Big Fat Truth website contains many half-truths about why butter is bad and Unilever’s fake butter products are good. Lesson one here: generally best to think critically, do objective research, and not trust the food industry to give you nutrition facts. Their job is to sell you products and make a profit, so guess what? They don’t really give a shit about your health. What they care about is marketing, and if they have to scare you with claims about saturated fats so that you’ll buy their fake butter products, they’ll do it. Profit over people.

Long story short, here folks: avoid these highly processed fake foods. Your body needs saturated fats. Over half of your brain is saturated fat, and your cells are encased in a fatty membrane that needs saturated fat to remain malleable so that they are able to communicate with other cells. Trans fats found in hydrogenated oils are the real evil culprits (cause cell walls to become rigid) and are implicated in heart disease and high blood pressure and obesity.

Remember when the food industry told us that saturated fat was bad, thus beginning the fat free fad of the 80s? Well, guess what? We didn’t get thinner, did we? We got fatter. And we got more heart disease, more diabetes, and more high blood pressure. Hmmmm, guess that wasn’t the problem. Whoops, it was the fake hydrogenated fat we engineered to replace saturated fat in the diet. Are we really going to wait for the food industry or the American Heart Association or whatever to tell us eggs are bad no good no butter is bad whoops hydrogenated oils are bad? You can’t go wrong by choosing foods from nature. Just don’t eat too much food, and move around more. That’s the secret.

Mary Vance, NC

Mary Vance is a Certified Nutrition Consultant and author specializing in digestive health. She combines a science-based approach with natural therapies to rebalance the body. In addition to her 1:1 coaching, she offers courses to help you heal your gut and improve your health. Mary lives in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe in Northern California. Read more about her coaching practice here and her background here.