I don’t want to keep beating a dead horse–or cow. But I just have to keep coming back to the government’s recent admission that their decades-long advice to cut dietary fat and cholesterol was completely wrong. The implications for your health are huge.
For example, after all the government’s twisting, turning, and churning, it turns out butter is one of the healthiest fats on the planet. And butter from grass-fed cows is even better. In fact, a recent study found that men and women who eat the most butter from grass-fed cows have a dramatically lower risk of developing heart disease.
It’s a wonder to behold how cattle can convert cellulose from grasses–which is indigestible to humans–into meat, milk, essential fats, and vitamins. Cellulose is a long chain of sugars linked together, and it gives wood and plants their incredible strength. It appears in plant cells, which have double-sided walls vs. the single membranes of animal cells. So it provides tremendous strength and durability.
Cows break down this tough substance with specialized teeth, and multiple stomachs and specialized digestive tracts. They also have special bacteria that help break down and metabolize cellulose in their stomachs.
Clearly, cows make for natural vegetarians by design. They can easily get these nutrients, which are indigestible to humans, out of plants. But the human digestive system isn’t equipped the same way. So we need meat and dairy for optimal nutrition.
Now, back to butter…
In the 1960s and 1970s, government health experts portrayed butter as a disaster-on-a-plate. Feeding off the flawed dietary guidelines, they called margarine a “healthy” alternative to real butter.
But as you know, margarine is essentially an industrial waste chemical for which manufacturers had to find a way, and an excuse, to dump on an unsuspecting public. Marketeers based their misleading margarine ads on zero real science. These ads were breathtaking in their stupidity, even for the lame stream media.
In fact, studies now show men and women who followed this faulty advice and substituted margarine for butter ended up suffering double the rates of cardiovascular diseases.
Butter is basically just milk fat, also known as butter fat. It contains all the healthy essential fats and 400 different fatty acids.
And, as I mentioned earlier, butter from grass-fed cattle is your best choice.
It has five times more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than butter from grain-fed cattle. It also contains many more omega-3 fatty acids, which benefit the heart, brain, and immune system. It’s also higher in vitamin K2, which you should always obtain from food sources rather than dicey dietary supplements.
Of course, all butter contains saturated fats, which government health “experts” swore would cause heart disease.
But now we know the government’s decades-long stance on saturated fat was complete bunk. The government itself now admits it was wrong about fat. Plus, three huge review studies in 2010 and 2014, which followed hundreds of thousands of people, showed zero association between saturated fats and heart disease.
Now, when it comes to preventing heart disease, the health benefits of butter seem to vary depending upon the country in which a study was done. In countries where cows are grass-fed, people who eat the most butter have a dramatically reduced risk of heart disease.
In a recent study done in Costa Rica, researchers looked at CLA levels in the fat tissue of 1,813 heart attack patients. (CLA is a direct marker of grass-fed, full-fat dairy consumption.) They compared those levels to 1,813 healthy people who hadn’t suffered heart attacks.
Turns out, men and women who had the most CLA were 50 percent less likely to have a heart attack. Plus, researchers found a dose-response effect between eating more grass-fed butter and having a lower risk of heart attack. In other words, the more grass-fed butter they ate, the lower their heart attack risk.
In another study from Australia, people who ate the most full-fat diary had a 69 percent lower risk of heart disease.
Of course, real butter also contains critical fat-soluble vitamins like D and E. And as a regular reader of my Daily Dispatch, you know vitamin D plays a huge role in preventing just about every chronic disease known to man.
But chances are, you haven’t heard as much about vitamin E. Mainstream medicine often neglects this essential nutrient for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s difficult to measure the amount of E that’s actually circulating in your body. So the government is basically clueless about how much of the vitamin humans really need for optimal health.
But vitamin E is definitely not something to be taken for granted. Research shows this nutrient is crucial for every stage of life–from helping fetuses develop normally to staving off Alzheimer’s disease. It’s also important for your heart, eyes, and immune system. And it’s vital for brain health. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the December 2014 issue of Insiders’ Cures, a shocking 93 percent of people aren’t getting enough of this essential nutrient. (Consequently, I recommend taking 50 mg of vitamin E per day in supplement form, in addition to incorporating vitamin-E rich food into your diet.)
So keep spreading a little butter from grass-fed beef on your toast. Feel free to saute’ your vegetables and grass-fed steak in it too. It will give you plenty of essential fats and so many vital nutrients hard to get anywhere else.
Source:
- “Conjugated linoleic acid in adipose tissue and risk of myocardial infarction,” Am. J Clin Nutr 2010 Jul;92(1):34-40