Is Butter a Health Food?

Do you love butter? Of course you do. Who doesn’t love butter? But when you add it to your cooking, do you also fold in a little teaspoon of guilt while watching that butter dissolve into batter? Or perhaps you are making a nice roasted veggie dish and silently screaming to yourself, “Hey, I’m making vegetables here, for Pete’s sake!” in the hopes that it will cancel out the “sin” of throwing a hunk of butter in the mix?

Well, what if you didn’t have to feel guilty about butter? What if butter, that tastebud dream maker, was really a health food star?

Before I blow your mind with some health facts about butter, let’s get one thing straight: I’m not talking about any ol’ butter. I’m talking about the good stuff — it’s got to be grass-fed, organic butter.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the point at hand.

Grass-fed, organic butter is rich in vitamins A, D, E, and K2. And I want to take a brief moment here to give a shout out to K2, which has been linked with reduced risk of osteoporosis and heart disease, and is difficult to obtain in a modern diet. Butter is also high in beta carotenes; according Bulletproof coffee founder Dave Asprey, one tablespoon of grass-fed butter has more beta carotenes than a bunch of carrots. But here is my favorite fact about butter: It is rich in conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which is a reported weight-loss supplement. Yeah, let me say that again: Butter is rich in fat-burning properties. (Is that the sound of margarine companies quietly weeping in a corner somewhere?)

American scientist Ancel Keys first proposed the correlation between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease in 1955, prompting the Seven Countries Study, which seemed to confirm this hypothesis. In 1956, the American Heart Association announced that a diet high in animal fat and coronary disease were linked, and the U.S. government recommend a low-fat diet as the key to heart health.

The idea that fat makes you fat led to the invention of margarine, and with all those baby-boomer mamas feeding their kids margarine, our fat intake as a nation had dramatically decreased by the 1970s. Meanwhile obesity, heart disease, and diabetes rates took off like a collection of crazy rocket ships operated by a pack of wild monkeys.

Now that I’ve dropped some buttery health knowledge and made your spirits and taste buds soar, I’m going to leave you with one of my favorite ways to enjoy butter every morning: in coffee.

I actually eat a predominantly dairy-free diet, except for butter, and when I started adding butter to my coffee, I lost weight. But if you are dairy-free and want to remain so, I highly recommend you give ghee a try. It’s not only delicious, but all the milk proteins have also been cooked out of it, leaving just the nutrient-rich, dairy-free fat.

Ghee has been an Ayurvedic ingredient for thousands of years, is extremely tasty, and frankly deserves it’s own post, but suffice it to say, it’s also delicious in your coffee, so feel free to substitute it if you like.

And if you don’t drink coffee, try this morning combination: ghee, matcha, coconut oil, a splash of homemade almond milk, and a pinch of cinnamon.