This recent study from Japan found that middle-aged men and women who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke. The rate of strokes was 30% lower in the highest intake quintile compared to the lowest quintile. There was a non-significant reduction in heart disease.
Other big differences were correlated with saturated fat intake. For example, those in the highest quintile had more college education than those in the lowest quintile and were more likely to do sports >1 hr/week. These data by themselves won’t convince anyone that saturated fats are beneficial. But they should push you in that direction. Contrary to what you’ve heard a million times.
As far as I can tell, eating lots of butter has lowered my blood pressure. High blood pressure is associated with greater risk of stroke.
Although pig fat certainly helped me (I slept better), I’ve found butter is even better. Butter has considerably more saturated fat than pig fat. The fat in butter is 60% saturated fat, whereas pig fat is 40% saturated fat. My consumption of 60 g/day of butter gives me 36 g/day saturated fat. In this study, persons in the highest quintile of intake averaged 20 g/day. The highest intake in the whole study (60,000 people) was 40 g/day. In addition to butter, I eat cheese, whole-fat yogurt, and meat, so I’m surely higher than that.
Via Whole Health Source.
I had a pretty severe health disaster recently.
Malnutrition + anxiety -> negative feedback loop that ended up causing serious damage. Overnight I went from being a lifelong near-narcoleptic to an insomniac. At one point I thought I was developing schizophrenia due to mild hallucinations (there’s a correlation between malnutrition and the onset of psychopathology).
It’s been several months and I feel like my brain is slowly improving. I can’t sleep as well as I used to, but I can’t complain either. One thing I’m consciously doing is eating massive amounts of butter and high fat dairy products. Based on my day-to-day experience (e.g. some days of eating no butter, and having somewhat worse sleep the following night) I can’t help but believe that saturated fat is playing a key role in short-term and long-term brain function.
A couple of things. The USDA recommends limiting sat fat to 10% of calories. If you eat 2000 total calories per day, that would be 200 calories of sat fat. there’s 9 calories per gram of fat, so that would be 200/9 = 22 grams of sat fat. So on average, the highest quintile was eating the USDA recommendation for sat fat.
Which then makes you wonder how little fat the lowest quintile was eating. Usually, foods with high saturated fat come from animal sources…which means they also contain significant cholesterol. So the people in the lowest quintile were possibly eating no animal fat…maybe traditional lowfat Japanese food? with highly salted (preserved) fish? and low amounts of cholesterol? When Japanese switch from traditional diets to more Westernized food (in moderation), a lower risk of stroke has been noted in the past. This has been attributed to the protective effect of adding a little more cholesterol to the diet and reducing salt.
Cholesterol is crucial to the membrane stability of every cell in your body. Increased salt intake is associated with increased blood pressure. Increased pressure against weakened membranes on vascular cells can lead to rupture. There’s also concern that reducing cholesterol too low with statins can lead to increased stroke risk.
So perhaps the take home message from this study is that if you’re eating a traditional Japanese diet, you can go ahead and add a cheeseburger every day for lunch.
Seth, why don’t you try culturing your butter, if you haven’t already. Take some heavy cream, throw a dollop of yogurt in it and stir, wait overnight. Then whisk the cream until it butters up. Drain off the buttermilk (and drink!), then wash the butter in water to get rid of the excess buttermilk (or the butter will apparently go sour in a less than tasty way, but who knows). It is very buttery, more so than uncultured sweet cream butter, and gives you saturated fat and more delicous lactobacilli.
do you eat the butter so that you taste it? is it possible that some effects have to do with tasting it?
i’ve been alternating between butter and canola and flax oil for a couple weeks for my SLD routine and find that butter is pretty effective and easier on my stomach than canola or flax. but i haven’t noticed any mood or intelligence effects, and my sleep is so variable (and has remained so) that i’d have to chart it to be sure of anything.
flax oil has the problem that i can kinda sorta taste it even half an hour later, so i’ll have to figure out how to do it right.
All I can say is that the butter sold by Spring Hill at the Berkeley Farmers’ Markets is from pasture-fed cows in Petaluma — and it is VERY TASTY. Spring Hill claims it does contain Weston Price’s “X-Factor,” i.e. Vitamin K2.
I get myself in trouble (?) by leaving it on the kitchen counter to soften, right next to a container of crackers. No knife needed. Talk about instant gratification…
q, I started by tasting it. Lost 10 pounds. Then started gaining it back. Then switched to eating it noseclipped. Then started losing again. You won’t notice the intelligence effects unless you carefully measure it, as I did. I wasn’t terribly good at predicting how well I’d do on the arithmetic test.
CTB, that’s very interesting. The very low rate of Japanese heart disease has usually been attributed to lots of fish and low saturated fat. This study makes that explanation unlikely — and therefore makes more likely an alternative explanation I like: the low rate of heart disease is due to all the fermented foods they eat (e.g., miso). The high rate of Japanese stroke has usually been attributed to a salty diet. This study suggests it’s due to too-little saturated fat.
I’ll up my consumption of saturated fat after you report an improvement in your follow-up heart scan
Seth, there are a lot of little nuggets of nutrition-related information scattered throughout your blog posts and comments. I think it would be useful for your readers if you could organize and condense them into some kind of longer document.
I tend to stay away from cheap sausages knowing that they are mostly fat, skin and unappealing low-value cuts. But sometimes I wonder whether any of this is truly unhealthy in moderation. People often joke that haggis is junk-food, but it’s not in the least.
Alex, thanks for the suggestion. But there are not enough hours in the day.
“As far as I can tell, eating lots of butter has lowered my blood pressure.”
At what time(s) of day do you take your blood pressure?
I take my blood pressure early in the morning. Such as 6 am.