25 Reasons Butter is a Superfood

Butter is good for you

Butter. Its fueled humanity since the dawn of time.

Ok, maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but butter has seriously been around as far back as written history began being recorded. It’s been a staple in the diets of people everywhere.

Butter used to be quite popular in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Americans everywhere used to enjoy butter at every single meal. We were a nation of butter eaters.

In 1909, Americans consumed 14.3 lbs. of butter per year per person. But things changed, and butter consumption plummeted. By 2004, butter consumption was only at 3.7 lbs. of butter per person per year. (Source).

This was primarily due to false, and misleading research in the mid-1900s, which widely promoted that fats were bad for you, and that saturated fats (butter) were evil. So people cut butter out of their diets. It ended up being the most disastrous health experiment in the history of the world. Incidents of heart disease and obesity actually increased dramatically as people cut butter from their diets.

Read my previous post on how fat became bad.

But why the negative outcome when cutting butter from your diet. It turns out, when this health advice was being given out, we didn’t fully understand the health effect butter had on the human body. In fact, we didn’t realized that we were cutting one of the healthiest foods for the human body out of our diets. We cut America’s #1 superfood from our diets.

Butter is a Superfood

Because of all the negativity about saturated fats, butter wasn’t really viewed as being part of a healthy diet. So research on the benefits of butter stagnated. But recently, there have been so many breakthroughs about the benefits of butter. Butter has many positive health benefits.

Butter just doesn’t help your body in 1 or 2 ways. Oh contraire, butter helps your body in a vast number of different ways. Researchers are only scratching the surface on the variety of ways butter can help the human body. Butter is a basic, bedrock ingredient to a healthy diet. Butter is actually a powerful superfood.

Here are a few reasons why you should be eating butter:

25 Reasons why butter is a Superfood:

Nutrient Dense: When you’re eating butter, you’re eating something rich in beneficial bio-active compounds, and fatty acids. Unlike other foods that only have a few beneficial ingredients, butter is packed with nutrients. Butter is nutrient dense, and full of Vitamin A, E, D, K, antioxidants, minerals including selenium, manganese, chromium, zinc, copper, Cholesterol, Fatty acids like Conjugated linoleic acid, butyric acid, arachidonic acid (brain function and healthy cell membranes, Lauric acid, short and medium chain fatty acids in the perfect omega 3 to omega 6 balance, lecithin (metabolic health), Iodine in a highly absorbable form, glycosphingolipids (protects against gut infections)

**Butter is full of beneficial nutrients and bioactive compounds**

Improves your Cholesterol: We’ve all heard that butter is bad for your cholesterol, but it’s just not true. Butter helps increase levels of HDL (the good cholesterol), and actually changes the LDL (bad cholesterol) from small and dense to large LDL. Both of these factors actually reduce your risk for heart disease.

Vitamin Absorption: Milk fat helps your body absorb fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, and other fat soluble vitamins. If you take fat soluble vitamins without any fat, they won’t be absorbed by your body. You need fat in order to digest these kinds of vitamins. So go ahead and add butter to your vegetables, it’s a requirement for vitamin absorption.

Brain food: Butter is a real brain food. Butter is abundant in DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, which is a primary structural component of the human brain. Also full of Arachidonic acid which is the most abundant fatty acid in the brain which helps to maintain hippocampal cell membrane fluidity, and protect the brain from oxidative stress. Butter is literally fuel for your brain.

Helps you stay full: Butter helps you stay full longer. This of course leads to less snacking throughout the day, and eating less of those empty calories. (For this reason, butter can actually help you eat less sugar and carbohydrates which increase your risk for health problems like obesity and heart disease).

Doesn’t clog your arteries: In fact, it’s entirely untrue that saturated fats clog your arteries. 74% of the fats found in artery clogs are unsaturated (of which 41% are polyunsaturated fats i.e. canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil.) (Source)

Butter is a Natural Fat: Butter is a natural fat. Unlike vegetable oils (which are processed), butter fat is produced by nature and built for digestion and nutrient distribution. And while we aren’t of the bovine breed, we are humans which are essentially mammals. And as mammals, we have been designed to take advantage of this nutrient transference in milk and dairy.

Good for your cells: Butter and other saturated fats are a vital part of cell membranes, giving them stiffness and integrity necessary for proper function. (Source)

Good for your bones: Butter helps increase calcium absorption. Fat soluble vitamins like A and D are essential to help you effectively incorporate more calcium and other minerals into your body’s skeletal structure.

Strong Immune System: Interestingly, by allowing the adsorption of more fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A, butter contributes to a strong, healthy immune system. The short and medium chain fatty acids present in butter have immune system strengthening properties which helps keep you healthy.

Anti-arthritis/ Anti-stiffening: Dutch researcher Wulzen found that butter can help protect against calcification of the joints (degenerative arthritis) as well as hardening of the arteries, and cataracts. Surprisingly he also found that butter helps prevent the calcification of the pineal gland. (Source)

Healthy Bodyweight: Butter doesn’t make you fat. Your body doesn’t store butter as fat in your body. The short and medium chain fatty acids in butter are not stored in the adipose tissue, but are used for quick energy. Fat tissue in humans is composed mainly of longer chain fatty acids which come from olive oil and other polyunsaturated oils, as well as from refined carbohydrates. Butter helps hormone regulation which contributes to healthier bodyweight. (Source)

Makes your kids beautiful/ handsome: If your want your kids to be awesome, feed them butter. Kids will grow better on butter. In fact, vitamin A is a necessary component to the healthy growth of children. People who’ve been deprived of proper amounts of vitamin A (fat soluble vitamin in butter) during gestation tend to have narrow faces and skeletal structure, small palates and crowded teeth. Extreme deficiencies result in blindness, skeletal problems and other birth defects.People who’ve gotten optimal vitamin A from the time of conception have broad handsome faces, strong straight teeth, and excellent bone structure. (Source)

Your Heart runs on Fat: Eating butter is healthy for your heart. Butter is the very fuel your heart needs to operate. Unlike other muscles in your body, the heart doesn’t run on glucose. Instead the heart is fueled entirely by fatty acids like those in butter….. Butter: It fuels your heart.

**<3 Butter is good for your heart <3**

Conjugated Linoleic Acid: Butter is the best single source of Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), a fatty acid which has been shown to be linked to good health and weight management. This fatty acid is anti-cancer, anti-heart disease, and anti-body fat. When CLA was fed to rats, it prevented tumor growth from developing.

Butyric Acid: The best source of Butyric acid is butter. Butter has high amount of this short-chain fatty acid. Butyric acid is anti-carcinogenic, and also helps prevent certain types of cancer. It’s anti-inflammatory, helps stimulate the body’s immune response, protects against mental illness, increases the body’s metabolism, and reduces the effects of type-1 diabetes.

Oleic Acid: Butter is also a great source of Oleic acid. This fatty acid helps increase HDL cholesterol (the good one) and lowering LDL cholesterol (the bad one).

Milk Fat Globule Membrane: milk fat (aka butter) is surrounded by a structure called the milk fat globule membrane. Think the bubble membrane that surrounds and encases the fat in milk. This membrane is present in milk, and researchers are only beginning to discover the numerous beneficial bio-active compounds. Many of the compounds are anti-viral and anti-microbial in nature. (Source)

Protects your Gut: Butter contains a compound called glycosphingolipids which is a special type of fatty acids that protect against gastro-intestinal infections, especially in the very young and the elderly. Interestingly, children who drink skim milk have diarrhea at 3 to 5 times more than children who drink whole milk. The cholesterol in butterfat promotes health of the intestinal wall and protects against cancer of the colon. Short and medium chain fatty acids protect against pathogens, and have strong anti-fungal effects. Butter has also been shown to play a significant role in the treatment of candida overgrowth. (Source)

Anti–Cancer: Many of the fatty acids in butter are anti-cancer. Much research has been done proving that the fatty acids in butter help reduce tumor growth. Interestingly, when butter consumption was highest in the U.S., incidents of cancer were non-existent. (Source)

Anti-Heart Disease: Butter consumption is linked to lower incidents of heart disease. Countries where people eat diets high in butter have lower incidents of heart disease than countries eating small amounts of butter. Being that many of the fatty-acids in butter improve Cholesterol, this fact should not be surprising. In fact, many cardiologists have confirmed that butter is not what’s causing heart disease. (Source)

**As butter consumption decreased, cancer and heart disease increased in America** (Source)

**Countries with high saturated fat diets (i.e. butter) have less incidents of heart disease than countries that eat less saturated fats** (Source)

Good for your Hormones: Butter contributes to healthy regulation of your body’s hormones.

Male Health: Butters been proven to increase levels of testosterone in men. An increase in testosterone leads to increased ability to build muscle, and more awesomeness as a guy.

Female Health: Studies have shown that women who consumed more dairy fat had less PMS symptoms and fertility issues than women who ate less. Cholesterol is necessary for building progesterone, which is commonly deficient in women who suffer from PMS and other hormone imbalances.

Makes everything taste great: (common knowledge)

Battling the Paradigm problem

I’ll be the first to admit that getting used to the idea that butter as a health food is a real challenge. Even though I can know all this information about how butter is good for you, we have all been programmed and conditioned to view butter as being bad.

So go ahead and try it now, be liberal with your butter consumption. How guilty do you feel for indulging in so much butter? It’s really hard to get rid of that voice telling you that butter is bad. But it’s the truth, butter is actually good for you.

Start eating more butter and notice if you cut down on snacking, and just start feeling better. Who knew that being healthy could taste so good. With so many health benefits it’s obvious that butter one of nature’s most powerful superfoods.