This just in – new studies show that butter is not as detrimental to your health as studies once suggested. Nutritionally speaking, butter is still worse for your health than is olive oil, but it’s actually “better” than sugar.
The new research continued to support the already growing trend against adopting a low-fat diet. In a study that included over 600,000 people, researchers concluded that consuming butter did not actually increase your risk of heart disease and actually even helped protect against developing type 2 diabetes.
Study author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian clarifies that this study is not saying butter is a health food. The clarification he makes about butter is that “it doesn’t seem to be hugely harmful or beneficial” to a person’s health.
Dr. Mozaffarian’s study falls in line with a new wave of advice from nutritionists: cutting back on fat, even saturated fat, is actually more detrimental to a person’s health than beneficial.
The study, published in PLOS ONE, revealed that butter consumption was not, in fact, linked to a person’s risk of developing chronic disease.
Conversely, research is suggesting that saturated fat is better for your health than processed carbohydrates, like white bread and sugar. Processed carbs have been associated with an increased risk of developing diabetes or heart disease and becoming obese.
Dr. Mozaffarian and his research team ultimately hope that their study doesn’t cause nutrition conversations to revolve around introducing butter, but rather, move these conversations toward considering the foods people eat, rather than the specific nutritional content of each ingredient.
“In the end,” Dr. Mozaffarian said, “just making decisions about a food based on one thing like saturated fat is not useful.”
