Why You Should Eat More ButterYou should eat more butter. If you are already aware that butter is a “superfood” then perhaps you already eat a lot. If you are curious as to why you should eat more butter then continue reading. At the end, I ask you to tell me why everyone should eat more ORGANIC butter.
Grass-fed is best. Organic is next best. Conventional is worst but still better than margarine unless the margarine is organic.
1. Perfect for cooking
Butter is made up of mostly saturated fat which is more heat stable then all other types of fats. You do NOT want to cook with polyunsaturated fats since they oxidize when exposed to heat. This can leads to all sorts of problems. Butter, coconut oil and palm oil are best for cooking due to their saturated fat content.
2. Makes all foods more palatable
Do you have kids who don’t like to eat their veggies, especially leafy greens like kale or spinach? Cook them in butter. Or steam them and add butter when finished cooking. Doing this will surely increase the chances of your kids eating vegetables or greens.
Do you want to eat more liver but don’t like the taste? The next time I decide to cook liver I will surely be frying it with TONS of butter or bacon fat. Liver is not appetizing to most folks including myself but butter will change that at least a little.
3. High in Vitamin A
Per tablespoon, grass-fed butter has 10% of your daily value of Vitamin A. Butter from conventionally raised cows contains 7% of your daily value of Vitamin A. This may not seem like much if you compare it to sweet potatoes but realize that sweet potatoes contain a pre-cursor form of Vitamin A. It has to go through a conversion process before your body is able to absorb it.
4. High in CLA
CLA is Conjugated Linoleic Acid. It’s a naturally occurring trans fat that is much more present in grass-fed animals compared to conventionally raised animals. It’s known to be anti cancerous. You want a lesser chance of getting cancer, correct? Go buy some grass-fed butter!
5. Easier on your wallet; inexpensive source of calories
Butter is inexpensive. At the Fulton Street Farmers Market here in Grand Rapids, MI I can buy 1 pound of grass-fed butter for $4.25 per lb. In Chicago, more specifically Wrigleyville, I can buy Kerrygold grass-fed butter at Trader Joe’s for around $6 per lb. Because butter is almost pure fat, its very calorie dense. This is a good thing folks! You don’t want to limit your intake of real food!
One pound of butter has 32 tablespoons which equates to about 3200 calories. At 700 calories per meal, I could eat a meal of butter for only 93 cents!
6. Lactose and casein is almost non existent
Lactose – the sugar in dairy, and casein – the protein in dairy, are two very common allergens. Lactase is the enzyme that is needed to breakdown lactose. Pasteurization kills this
miracle enzyme. This is one of many reasons why folks have many problems with dairy. If you have acne, then you should most definitely avoid dairy.
What about butter?
Unless you are severely intolerant to casein and/or lactose, you will do just fine with organic butter. The only dairy I consume on a regular basis is butter. I enjoy cheese from time to time, especially if it’s grass-fed and raw. I don’t do well with other forms of dairy.
7. It’s easy to make clarified butter (this is a great site too) ghee.
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/03/how-to-clarify-butter-recipe/
Some folks are extremely sensitive to casein and/or lactose. Is this you? No worry… you can still eat butter! You just need to clarify it or buy ghee from a place like Whole Foods. Purity Farms is a fantastic brand. This simple process completely removes the delicate amounts of casein and lactose that are present. Thus, you have no worries…. anyone can enjoy butter! I have tried Purity Farms ghee before and it did have a slightly different taste than regular ole’ butter but it was still yummy.
Learn how to make clarified butter (ghee) here.
8. Easy storage
You can store butter in the refrigerator or you can leave it out around room temperature. It softens a bit when left out but stays as a solid stick. A solid stick… how easy! If you are following a recipe that calls for butter then its easy to gather however many tablespoons you need. Each stick (unless you buy some crazy ass butter) has 8 tablespoons and usually the paper around each stick is marked.
9. So “I can’t believe it’s not butter” goes extinct
I can’t believe its not butter either folks. Have you ever looked at the ingredients of this product? Millions still believe all butter is harmful. I mean, its a whole, real, nutritious, satisfying food. It has one ingredient and so it must be bad, right? All that saturated fat and cholesterol…
Butter is amazingly healthy. Tasty too. Maybe, just maybe, these non butter food like products will go extinct if butter becomes famous again.
10. Eating locally-sourced butter from pastured cows takes money out of the pockets of large corporations and gives it to a farmer.
COMMENTS: Mixed half butter with an equal half coconut oil. I know i should eat more coconut oil and this will be an excellent way, I have no problem eating enough butter. I know they say to dissolve it in water but i don’t care for that. It is great for cooking, as it, like butter and palm oil, does very little splattering and doesn’t leave a sticky residue in the container: I just dn’t fry that often.
Pet meds–especially dogs–squished into a spoonful of butter means you won’t have the pill spit back out at you. I slide the spoon with the butter/pill combo across the top of the dog’s mouth and–in 2 or 3 licks–its gone. So much easier than any other method!
I can testify to it: My mother is 94 yrs. old and she still eats a lot of butter on her breakfast toasts every morning and sometimes with afternoon tea. Her mind’s clarity and brilliance are astounding, and us, her children are always surprised when she comes up with these things that we assume a person her age is not/or should not be aware of…… But she’s relentless, to say the least.
And I’m doing exactly the same thing. Piling up the butter on my toast is something I’m not giving up. I really enjoy it as I do very few foods. Besides, I also want to keep a mind that would work on its own, instead of relaying on meds.
But if you like man made food here is a bit of info you might like.
Magarine was made to fatten up animals for a bigger buck at slaughter. When it was rejected due to making the animals sick, the inventors decided to save there bank account and fix it for humans. They added yellow food coloring and enhanced the flavor and wella, they got rich as people gobbled it up.
Have a wonderful day!
I have seen the documentary and it had me touting a vegan diet to a lot of my patients (I shall clarify – a well rounded and highly diverse vegan diet). Today I actually had a meeting with a very well known doctor who advocates (and is a living testament) to the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer type diet and she was able to convince me that some animal products are okay to incorporate. However, it is extremely important to source any animal product you buy and only purchase organic meats. This is especially true of organ meats which are also the best source of vitamins, minerals, and other nutraceuticals. You can do pretty good on a vegan diet, but it will require B12 and CoQ10 supplementation as these are very hard to come by in non-fortified vegan products. As far as milk leaching calcium from the bones – a diet high in phosphate (soft-drinks, high protein, and milk also contains some phosphate) can remove calcium but I like to remind people that bones require over 24 vitamins/minerals all working together in balance. Some of these include Vitamins D and K, magnesium, boron, silicon, phosphate, and calcium. I doubt the phosphate in milk is contributing too much to leaching calcium from bones – especially considering the high calcium content in milk.
Arneil: There is no clear definition as to what animal-to-plant ratio in a diet would distinguish between an omnivore and a facultative carnivore/herbivore. Even if we are herbivores, we are most definitely facultative herbivores – you can observe this with your naked eye. But if that were the case, then human herbivores would not need any supplements to stay healthy. Humans thrive when they get enough omega-3s, specifically EPA/DHA, but most plant foods have extremely low w-3:w-6 than animal foods like fish. Even in flaxseeds, the w-3s available are in the form of ALA. If we were herbivores, our conversion of ALA to DHA/EPA would be much higher than a meek 4%. So, therein lies the argument that we are omnivores. The real question worth asking is whether or not we are carnivores
Roper says:The comment above about how many people who cannot drink pasteurized milk but have no problems with raw milk is exactly what happens with me. I FINALLY had an allergist confirm I am not allergic to milk BUT the synthetic vitamin D that is added in the pasteurization process. Unfortunately, many “organic” milk brands add synthetic vitamin D.
Oh and the 10th reason I use real butter is because one day my son asked me the difference between butter and margarine… I put a package of each on the table and had him read ingredients. When he was finished reading margarine’s ingredients I tol him to just go ahead and throw it away. We have been margarine free ever since.
Ann, in no way am I endorsing the consumption of margarine, but the chemist side of me has to correct you. Everything in the entire world is one molecule away from being plastic. That molecule is polyethylene (C2H4), which is the molecule that the most common plastic is made from. Margarine is made from plant fats (C4H7O4 is the most common). As you can see these are two very different molecules, but yes, they are one molecule away from being one another. One of the main fats in butter is butyric acid (C4H8O2). So really Margarine is closer to butter than to plastic. Again, I stress that I’m not attacking you and I wholeheartedly agree that butter rules. There are just a million other bad things to say about margarine.
About butter: raw butter from grass fed pastured animals fed no antibiotics, hormones or genetically modified grains (that they are not designed to eat) is far superior to anything pasteurized. IF you can’t get raw from a local farmer or milk co-op Kerrygold is a secondary choice, but it is pasteurized. Raw butter heals. As referenced above, Sally Fallon and Mary Enig PhD wrote a book called “Nourishing Traditions” which helps us make real home made foods including fermented kefir and yogurts. Dr. Weston Price traveled around the world in the 1920s and 1930s to check on the health of teeth around the world. What he found was those with healthy teeth had healthy bodies. Raw butter mixed with “fermented” like cod liver oil was especially healing. You can ready every type of diet book out there and you will find that each one feels it’s accurate in its assurance that its diet is the one and only…be it macrobiotic, paleo, metabolic typing, fit for life, mediterranean, the maker’s diet etc. etc. What I have found, as someone mentioned above, some thrive and HEALTHY animal food and some thrive on vegan/vegetarian. When I was in the jungle with indigenous cultures they ate totally differently than the Australian Aborigines when I was there. I studied diets while in Japan and Hong Kong which were different than some of the others. Eskimos eat a lot of blubber and seal meat, maybe because it is COLD up north. Meanwhile raw butter can be especially healing for gut issues and a huge majority of my clients come in with gut issues.
John says:Something else awesome about butter is the butyric acid content. This one guy has been writing about this a lot on a site called the bulletproof executive. he even puts butter in his coffee (kind of insane, but very tasty).
he was featured on MSN recently talking about butter.
Review: Why should you eat more grass-fed butter?
HEAVY CREAM ~If you need heavy cream for a recipe, make your own by combining mix 2/3 cup whole milk with 1/3 cup melted unsalted butter. This will give you 1 cup of heavy cream....good to know!
Margarine all of them, with few exceptions, found only at health food stores, have GMO soy, cottonseed oil and/or corn. Many mysterious diseases are being tallyed led back to GMO grain fed animals with genetically altered grains. All US soy and corn is not fit for human's and animals. If you have a ADD child the new treatment is a non-gmo diet. Many animals and human's have recouved from their illnesses. see:
http://roosterpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/09/genetic-roulette.html GMO food, grains, animal, ADD etc
www.thecomfortofcooking.com
