At my Quantified Self talk I described data that suggested butter improved my mental function. During the question period, a cardiologist in the audience said something about me killing myself — butter is unhealthy. The usual view.
I said I thought the evidence for the usual view was weak. He said, “The Framingham studies.” That was epidemiology, I said. It is notoriously hard to understand. My data was from something like an experiment. Much easier to understand. (And the Framingham study is a terrible example of the supposed evidence. To quote from it: “In the period between the taking of the diet interviews and the end of the 16-year follow-up, 47 cases of de novo CHD developed in the Diet Study group. The means for all the diet variables measured were practically the same for these cases as for the original cohort at risk.”) He replied that the reduction in heart disease in recent years was more support for the usual view. I said the recent decline in heart disease could have many explanations other than a reduction in animal fat intake. Many things have changed over the last 20 years.
There is epidemiological evidence that saturated fat is bad, yes, but it is not the Framingham study nor the recent decline in heart disease. And it really is difficult to interpret. The butter-is-bad interpretation could easily be wrong. The obvious problem is that, after people are told butter is bad, people who try hard to be healthy avoid butter. And they do a lot of other things, too, to be healthy. So butter consumption ends up confounded with a dozen other variables believed to affect your health. When I was growing up, my parents avoided butter because margarine was much cheaper. So butter consumption is confounded with income, another problem.
My tiny experiment, whatever its problems, was much easier to interpret.
If doctors ate more butter, then maybe they’d be smart enough to know what the hell they’re talking about.
Aren’t stomach-contents broken down into little molecular lego-bricks anyway?
It’s like, cholesterol is something your body makes when it thinks it needs more; it doesn’t pass directly from the stomach into the blood. I think many people imagine butter clogging up their arteries like it just flows right in there, from sandwich to heart, directly.
I wonder if this is part of the reason Weston Price was ignored. Not only was he an outsider, a dentist, his evidence was clear enough for anyone to understand.
It may be relevant to note again that lard-type fat and butter both come from animal sources, but lard is the fat storage depot of the animal, while butterfat is custom made by the mammary gland for the nourishment of infants. And the brains of infants are developing like crazy during those early months. Older cultures nursed for years. The composition of depot fat directly reflects the kind of fat you eat, and can vary alot between individuals eating different diets. Butter fat in milk is pretty consistent in composition…and it has a lot of short-chained fatty acids which aren’t found elsewhere in the diet in such quantity. Obviously evolution has selected for the best possible composition for infant development, because those were the infants who survived and went on to continue the race.
Quick and dirty: When fat goes through the digestive system, the components get disassembled, absorbed and reassembled in the gut cells (but not metabolized)…then dumped into the lymph…which is then dumped into the veins. It then circulates in the blood and cells/organs take what they need, while excess is taken up by the fat stores. The idea is to clear the blood of excess and maintain homeostasis. When you’re healthy and active, you can handle a high-fat meal. The problems come when the body can no longer quickly clear out the excess…whether because of age, illness, genetics, lack of exercise that would utilize it…whatever.
I worked in a hospital lab years ago. Tubes of coagulated blood have red cells on the bottom, and a clear yellow layer of serum on top. Occasionally there would be tubes with milky white gunky serum due to the high lipid content. Either these people had their blood drawn shortly after a high fat meal…or they had lipid metabolism problems. You don’t forget this image…and I’m sure the cardiologists have seen it. The thought of this gunk flowing through your veins is scary.
Half a stick of butter is 4 tablespoons or eight pats; roughly 400 calories. Not really that much for a male who is walking at least an hour a day. It would depend on whatever else you are eating along with it. Just make sure to cover your butt and get regular blood tests as you age. Maybe don’t eat it all at one time.
@ CTB,
At what temperature was the drawn blood in the tubes kept? Saturated fat does not congeal or thicken until it drops to at or below about 74 degrees F. The human body is typically around 98.6 F so saturated fat would be completely liquid (and not sticky or gunky).
Also, a high carbohydrate meal becomes a high fat meal from the point of view of vasculature. Most of the carbs cannot be burned off at the time of ingestion, so most of them are repackaged by the liver as palmitic acid (i.e., a saturated fat). So looking at the fat content of cooled blood will not differentiate a recent high-fat meal from a recent or chronic high-carbohydrate meal/eater.
An arresting image CTB, thanks for the explanation.
The lab was room temp. I did not mean to imply that the milky serum was solid like butter. These sera had visible fatty films which would cling to the side of the tubes, and when you poured the milky serum off the clot, it was more viscous. The fat from a meal is released into the lymph in chylomicrons..along with proteins to make it more soluble as it travels in the blood. Same for the saturated fats you mentioned that are released from the liver…they’re packaged with lipoproteins and are more soluble. Most of those tubes had clear serum, but some people, for whatever reason, had such overwhelming amounts of lipid in their blood that it was visibly present in their serum. How do you know if you have a problem like this? And if you’re healthy now, how do you know if you’re developing a problem? All I’m saying is that this is the world that cardiologists live in…and it’s easy for me to see why some of them quickly say ‘fat is bad.’
BTW, all of us in the lab tried eating cheeseburgers and fries and donuts (probably at least a decade before Morgan Spurlock was born)…then practiced taking blood from each other to see if our serum looked like this. It didn’t. We were young and apparently not showing any problems yet.
My family’s ethnic background is Polish…lots of butter and pork fatback in our cooking. No cardiac problems…no diabetes…folks live into their 90′s…but everyone stores fat in their thighs and butts and have relatively small waistlines. That’s our genetics. Other folks are not so lucky.
Yes, that sounds like a fat metabolism disregulation. Still, I think the notion that eating a high-fat meal will “clog the arteries” is a misconception based on how saturated fats are observed to congeal or thicken at room temperature (and thus clog a sink pipe, for example). I cook with coconut oil that I let sit out on my countertop near the stove. For most of the year it is a solid, but during the hot days of summer it becomes a liquid. My kitchen has never been close to 98.6 deg. F (more like a high in the low 80s) and so I am not worried about consuming high amounts of saturated fat. In fact, I take a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil, which is close to 90% saturated, every day.
Aaron, I’m curious if you noticed any positive effects from the daily coconut oil.
Alex, I think so, but a caveat is that I started taking coconut oil after making many dietary changes, such as following a primal lifestyle (as detailed on Mark’s Daily Apple). The spoonfuls of coconut oil have, I think, reduced my overall appetite (and I don’t take it following the SLD protocol). Also, my skin looks and feels like that of a younger person (I’m 41). Very supple and smooth. My gums are in the best condition ever in my life, too, but I have been taking high-vitamin fermented code liver oil and high-vitamin butter oil (both from Green Pastures) almost daily for the past two years.
OMG Aaron, you sound like an Adonis!
Not to beat this horse to death, but coconut oil in a jar…or a stick of butter in the refrigerator are relatively pure fat…whereas once in the bloodstream, these fats need to travel in an aqueous environment. So they’re packaged with lipoproteins to aid in transportation to the tissues, just like the steroid hormones (nonwater soluble) all have protein carriers, etc. Liquid oil agitated with water forms a mushy emulsion. If your body is not clearing fats from the blood fast enough, and the levels build up, what’s going to happen..especially when the blood needs to travel through arteries which have constricted openings due to plaque buildup. In this condition, if you eat a high-fat meal, you’re just adding to the mess. the problem is how do you know when you pass the point where your body is no longer clearing the fats out because you’re less active or whatever.
CTB, I’ve heard that if one eats a high-fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet, their body shifts to a ketogenic mode of fuel use in which they burn fat as the main fuel source rather than glucose. (I got this information from sources like Robb Wolf’s blog, Hyperlipid blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, Protein Power by Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades, etc.) I’ve been eating a ketogenic diet for over a year now (closer to two on or off). So, isn’t it probable that after a high fat meal my body is clearing the protein-packaged lipids out of the blood relatively quickly to burn for fuel? I haven’t come across evidence in the literature or on blogs that heart attacks or strokes are more likely following a single high-fat meal (or repeated ones, for that matter). Do you have references to suggest otherwise? I would love to get at the truth. I’m not wedded to the theory that the ancestral human (especially before the agricultural revolution) was generally running in ketosis (with some exceptions, e.g., the Kitavans), but it is a very compelling theory with a lot of supporting evidence. I would value very much any evidence that fails to support this theory.
Thanks,
Adonis