Butter Be Careful

Periodically, the news media gets very excited about some new health/medicine study that supposedly brings breakthrough knowledge to change people’s lives. You’ll see the same study mentioned multiple times on multiple news outlets for a period of time, and in most cases, the hype far exceeds the meaningfulness of the study. The latest hot story is the recently released study on the health effects of consuming butter.

Basically, this study found that those who consume the most butter had the highest risk of early mortality through increased rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease. That might sound ominous, but the reality is, the study was so poorly designed and the increased statistical risk was so small that it’s actually pretty meaningless.

Among the design flaws are that the study was done with self-reporting on the consumption of butter and other foods as a single retrospective estimate done once every 4 years. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really remember what I ate for dinner a few days ago, let alone specifically how much butter I might have consumed over a long period of time.

Another issue is that the study simply looked at butter as the culprit in the increased risks. It made a small attempt, but didn’t really address things like exercise and other healthy lifestyle factors – or the lack thereof. I think there’s a good chance that people who are more health-conscious eat less butter than those who don’t do things like exercise, avoid smoking, etc.

The study also lumped all dairy consumption with butter. In other words, they didn’t differentiate between butter consumption and, for example, drinking low-fat milk.

They also compared butter consumption to that of seed oils (olive, canola, etc.) and found that seed oil consumption lowered the risk of premature mortality. But as with butter and dairy, they lumped everything together and didn’t compare, for example, olive oil to other seed oils. There’s also a conflict of interest issue in that some of the researchers had financial connections to the seed oil industry.

There are other issues with the study, but I think you’re probably getting the idea.

Even with the study design flaws (which may or may not have been intentional to sway favor towards seed oils), the increase in what’s known as the “hazard ratio” for the top butter consumers was small. The high butter consumers came in at a hazard ratio of 1.15 as compared to the baseline of 1.0. It’s statistically significant, but barely, and that increased risk was for those with the highest butter consumption.

Despite these limitations, the media hype surrounding the study would make you think that eating a moderate amount of butter as part of your normal daily diet is going to drive you to an early grave.

Now, I’m not saying you should eat a stick of butter as a snack every day, but outside of extreme consumption, butter is not likely to cause you significant harm - unless you drop some on the floor and slip and fall! Consuming high quality plant oils like olive and avocado oil probably has some health benefits in the long run, and they are probably the best options for cooking.

One other consideration when it comes to butter is the type of butter. Again, with reasonable consumption, pretty much any butter is probably not going to cause significant problems. But organic butter helps you avoid potentially toxic residues from pesticides and herbicides in feed, as well as hormones and antibiotics given to commercial dairy cattle. For the healthiest butter, organic, grass-fed proucts shift the fat content towards the omega-3 side of the omega-3/omega-6 ratio.

Once again, media coverage of health information should be taken with a grain of salt – which will probably be the next subject the media flocks to for their stories on what’s about to kill you!

Until next time…

George F. Best, D.C.