For decades, we’ve heard that consumption of the saturated fat found in meat, cheese, and butter is nothing short of deadly. A juicy rib eye alongside a baked potato with butter and sour cream, for example, tend to earn “heart attack on a plate” status before you can pull the steak off the grill.
But an increasing number of nutrition experts and journalists (most recently, Nina Teicholz, author of the gripping The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet) have challenged this orthodoxy. What really kicked things off was a provocative piece titled “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” by Gary Taubes, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine back in July 2002.
“If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it,” Taubes wrote.
“They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling Dr Atkins' Diet Revolution and Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution, accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendation s—eat less fat and more carbohydrates — are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.”
Fast-forward to 2014, butter’s banner year. A meta-analysis of 72 studies titled Association of Dietary, Circulating and Supplement Fatty Acids With Coronary Risk, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in March, examined anew the widely held presumptions about the connections among fat, cholesterol, and heart disease. They concluded that “current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats”.
Predictably, the popular press was all over this like white on rice. “Butter Is Back,” brayed the hyperbolic headline of a March 24 op-ed by Mark Bittman, and “Ending the War on Fat,” by Bryan Walsh, was the cover story in the June 23 issue of Time magazine.
But before you get too excited, you must digress to read this little piece by David Katz, president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, on how easy it is to misinterpret analytical findings in general and the new study in particular.
In Katz’s view, the meta-analysis shows “(1) you cannot get a good answer to a bad question; and (2) there is more than one way to eat badly.”
“Now, consider for a moment some of the leading arguments about diet and health swirling around us,” he writes. “Are they all about dietary fat? Not remotely. Much of our collective attention over recent years has been focused on sugar, starches, carbohydrates in general, meat in general, processed meats, and grains.” But the meta-analysis makes no mention of sugar, he points out, suggesting the notion that “butter is back” represents far too narrow an understanding of what constitutes a healthy diet.
“People eating less saturated fat don’t simply stop eating a nutrient and leave a big hole in their diets,” Katz writes. “They eat less of A, and make up for it by eating more of B. The most obvious of questions, yet one to which this study was totally inattentive, is: what is B?”
In a paper titled “Is Butter Really Back? Clarifying the Facts on Fat,” the Harvard School of Public Health makes that point and then some, writing, “Exchanging a hot buttered cheesesteak for a half-dozen doughnuts does not help your heart; swapping it for grilled salmon with greens and olive oil does.” The message is not “eat more butter,” but that saturated fats are neither good nor bad for heart health — which doesn’t make for the best click-bait headlines.
As HSPH puts it, “campaigns which prioritise reducing saturated fat consumption, rather than focusing on foods and overall diet quality, are a misplaced and misleading public health strategy.” A notion that one of the coauthors of the “butter is back” meta-analysis, Dariush Mozaffarian, agrees with.
“The findings demonstrate that, in practice, when people lower their saturated fat intake, they don’t necessarily eat healthier diets,” he told HSPH. “Saturated fat is found in a range of foods — including not only butter and meats but also milk, yogurt, cheese, nuts, and vegetable oils. Each of these foods has different effects on heart disease. Instead of emphasising one nutrient, we need to move to food-based recommendations. We’re not going to artificially create healthy diets by manufacturing low-fat, low-saturated-fat packaged foods. What we eat should be whole, minimally processed, nutritious food — food that is in many cases as close to its natural form as possible.”
Can’t argue with that.
And me, personally? I love butter, always have, and always will. I enjoy it almost every day, whether on whole-grain toast in the morning or for supper, swirled into a quick pan sauce for grass-fed burgers or a compound butter for, well, just about anything. My ticker is in great shape, and I eat very little processed food and lots of vegetables and other good things, so in all honesty, I don’t worry about it.
Source: Flickr / Citrus and Candy
When it comes to buying butter, however, I am very, very choosy.
Tips on Buying, Storing, and Using Butter
• Buy butter wrapped in paper-backed foil instead of wax paper. Butter’s chief enemies are oxygen, light, and strong odors; wax-paper wrappers aren’t protective enough. Even if you go through butter very quickly, you still have no idea whether it was handled with care during its distribution process.
• When shopping, it’s a good idea to look for an expiration date before you buy.
• The easiest way to tell if your butter is less than optimal is to cut a slice and look at it in cross-section; if there’s a dehydrated-looking, different-colored layer on the outside, cut it off before using, as it will taste distinctly off, if not downright rancid.
• Salt is a preservative, so salted butter lasts longer than unsalted butter, but the salt can also mask off flavors. That’s why sweet, unsalted butter is the choice for bakers and many home cooks: They want to control the amount of salt added.
• Store butter in its original packaging (no butter dish or door compartment) in the coldest part of the fridge. Freeze what you’re not going to go through quickly.
This article originally appeared on takepart.com. Read the original here. Butter on muffin image by Citrus and Candy via Flickr.
