by Paul Fassa
(Health Secrets) Butter has been maligned as unhealthy for the past few decades. Fortunately, the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) has disagreed. The WAPF was started many decades ago by Weston Price, DDS. He and his wife traveled to isolated locations and examined the diets of healthy people not influenced by civilization.
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Others have discovered the truth about butter and disagree with butter’s bad rap as well. Butter is healthier for you than all the substitutes designed to replace butter, which actually damage your health. Instead of the margarine promo phrase “better than butter”, you might mentally replace that phrase with “butter is better”.
Why butter is better
There are three levels of butter: The most healthful level is butter made with the raw milk from grass fed cows. Second best but much more accessible from health food stores and some supermarkets is organic butter made from the pasteurized milk of grass fed cows that are not injected with antibiotics or rBGH. Then there is the mainstream commercial stuff that comes from factory farms.
As the WAPF states, even this last contaminated version of butter is better for you than margarine. That’s actually how bad margarine and other trans fats are for your health.
Many shun butter because they have been led to believe that eating fat is a bad thing to do. But the low fat diet is unhealthy for almost everyone. For example, children fed reduced fat milks have higher incidents of diarrhea than those on whole milk. The heart disease hype associated with cholesterol has been exaggerated to the point of now being declared a myth. A 1991 Medical Research Council study determined that men eating butter had half the heart disease risk as men eating margarine! Our bodies need the right kinds of fats to operate well, and butter is one of them.
Natural saturated fats can be converted to carbohydrates and burned in the body as needed. The trans-fatty acid fats contained in hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated processed oils and margarine gets stored as fat because they cannot be converted to carbohydrate fuel for energy. Furthermore, the free radicals and toxins associated with processing oils remain in the body’s fatty tissues.
Cholesterol is necessary for healthy nerves, especially in the brain and gastrointestinal tract. Butter from grass fed cows is also rich in minerals and trace minerals. It contains a lot of vitamins A, D and K2, which helps prevent osteoporosis and arthritis. The short and medium chain fatty acids in butter as well as the linoleic acid help prevent cancerous tumors.
Butter is an excellent source of two anti-carcinogenic fatty acids: butyric acid used by the colon for energy, and lauric acid, a potent antimicrobial and antifungal agent. Butter is a major source of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) another potent cancer fighting fatty acid. Levels of CLA are much higher in butter made from grass fed cows than from those coming from factory farms. Butter is one of only a very few fats providing a balance of omega 3 and omega 6 fats. Omega 3 is an important nutrient that is missing from most of our diets. Omega 3 is essential for our health, but our bodies don’t create it. It has to come from outside, from foods or supplements derived from foods.
Omega 3 helps prevent cognitive dysfunctions, of which Alzheimer’s is an extreme condition. Omega 3 also inhibits inflammatory conditions that produce stiffness and arthritis. Studies have shown that ADHD, bi-polar conditions, and many other mental or behavioral disorders are the result of low omega-3 in the body.
Central mountainous regions of the world that don’t have access to seafood but use butter have less Incidents of hypothyroidism than areas where people use fake butters and spreads and don’t eat seafood. That’s because there is enough accessible iodine in butter to keep the thyroid gland happy. Healthier heart, better circulation, better bones, even better minds are attributed to the types of nutrients, fatty acids and omega balance that real butter provides.