When I got home from picking up my weekly share one day back in the spring, I sliced some beautiful, new pink and white radishes as thinly as I could, laid them on small, thickly buttered whole-grain crackers, and set them on a colorful tray on the kitchen counter while I prepared to wash strawberries and lettuce. Everyone helped to make them disappear. Sweet and spicy, soft and crunchy, the combination of textures and flavors was as supremely satisfying as such an earthly pleasure can be. The spicy, crunchy radish; the fragrant, seeded crackers; and the sweet, warm butter. Bright yellow butter from cows who eat grass growing in bright yellow sunshine.
Real butter? Are you kidding? Doesn’t butter contain saturated fat? Yes it does. And isn’t saturated fat supposed to be bad for you? On the contrary. Here are a few interesting tidbits for you to digest: Olive oil is 13% saturated fat. Cocoa butter, the main fat in dark chocolate, is one of the most highly saturated fats on the planet. And trans fat, which has been absolutely and incontrovertibly identified as a cause of premature coronary artery disease, is an unsaturated fat. It cannot, therefore, be true that unsaturated fats are good for you and saturated fats are bad. William Castelli, director of the Framingham Heart Study, which initially enrolled 6000 people from Framingham, Massachusetts, and has been running since 1948, reported that the data indicate the more saturated fat one eats, the lower that person’s serum cholesterol appears to be. The study has found that people who eat the most saturated fat weigh the least and are the most physically active. So don’t deprive yourself–deciding not to eat something simply on the basis of its saturation gets you nowhere.
Here are a few more facts about saturated fats. We are made of saturated fat. Because they are highly stable, they give our cells their integrity. They play a vital role in bone health by promoting incorporation of calcium into the skeletal structure. They lower Lp(a) [also called “lipoprotein a”], a substance in the blood that is highly correlated with premature heart disease. The short- and medium-chain length saturated fats (found mainly in butter, chicken fat, coconut and palm oil) have antimicrobial properties; they enhance immune system function. In other words, maybe it’s more than just the steam in chicken soup that makes it such a fine choice when you’re under the weather.
A more useful way to understand fats is to consider whether they are natural or synthetic. Dr. Mary Enig, a lipidologist at the University of Maryland and the first to blow the whistle on trans fats back in the 1970s, has studied fats for her entire career. She points out some of the fundamental changes that occurred in the American diet through the 20thcentury. Previously, most consumed fats were either saturated (butter, lard, tallow (beef), coconut) or monounsaturated (olive oil). Today, the majority of fats are polyunsaturated, derived from soy, corn, safflower and canola. Because polyunsaturated fats are inherently unstable, most are hydrogenated or refined to extend their shelf life. Hydrogenation is the process by which manufacturers turn liquid oils into shortening and margarine by adding hydrogen. This is how trans fats are created. Trans fats act like saturated fat in cooking (think of Crisco), but they work more like plastic once they get inside you. They aren’t really food, they just act like it. That’s what I mean by synthetic fats. Bottom line: If it isn’t found in nature, don’t eat it.
In view of these interesting ideas, let’s talk more about butter. Butter has just about the widest variety of fatty acid lengths and shapes of any food. Why? Well, let’s think about it. Where is butter found? In milk. Who drinks milk? Babies. Like humans, goats, kittens, deer, water buffalo, calves, and yak. Developing mammals. Developing organisms need high-quality food that’s going to provide all the raw materials necessary to build the tremendous variety of tissues in their bodies. Bone, heart and skeletal muscle, brain and nerves, corneas, kidneys, liver, nails, hair, you name it. Butter also contains conjugated linoleic acid, a fatty acid that normalizes fat distribution and decreases truncal obesity. Truncal obesity means abdominal fat, the kind that collects at the waistline and is a risk factor for diabetes and heart disease.
Here’s one more reason to eat butterfat, which you can also get by drinking whole milk. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin. This means that it is found in fat. No fat, no Vitamin D. Along with decreased sun exposure, the large drop in whole milk, cream and butter consumption has resulted in an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency throughout the country. Not only does Vitamin D enhance calcium absorption and protect your bones and teeth, it improves your insulin sensitivity and lipid profile. It also helps protect you from diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. If you have concerns about your own Vitamin D status, ask your doctor to check your levels.