Last week a journalist asked me why the 5% improvement in arithmetic speed produced by butter was important. In an earlier post I said I’d given a poor answer. A few days later I figured out what I should have said. The article was delayed, it turned out, so there was time to use my new strategy. I answered the question like this:
I was excited by this discovery because it was so big and unexpected. Someone once found a correlation between IQ and reaction time. The higher your IQ, the faster your reaction time. I don’t know what the exact function was but a decrease of 30 milliseconds might correspond to 10 more IQ points. I felt a little bit smarter. It was so unexpected because hardly anyone was going around saying butter is good for you — and thousands of people were saying it is bad for you. The only ones saying butter is good for you were the followers of Weston Price, and they had almost no evidence for what they were saying. Compared to their evidence, my evidence was crystal clear. Among mainstream nutritionists, butter is universally scorned. Yet my data suggested exactly the opposite — that it had a large amount of an important nutrient I wasn’t getting enough of. If mainstream nutrition advice could be so wrong, it would have big implications for what we eat. Maybe other things we are constantly told about what to eat are also wrong.
I discovered this big effect of butter by substituting butter for pork fat. So the reason butter was so helpful wasn’t anything as simple as animal fat is food for us. I ate plenty of animal fat before I started eating lots of butter. The reason was something more specific.
did you ever get an answer to the AGE issue? (i.e., hi Advanced Glycation End-products generated by consuming butter)
Curious that you didn’t think to mention that the WAPF folks believe that this important nutrient in butter is vitamin K2 (see https://www.westonaprice.org/abcs-of-nutrition/175-x-factor-is-vitamin-k2.html).
In terms of your testing, have you considered trying high vitamin butter oil instead of the copious amounts of butter?
yes, I think the answer is that ordinary butter — not heated after purchase — is high in AGEs.
Butter is high in Vitamin K (K2) which is being studied in greater detail as of late and could be involved in a host of processes that contribute to greater health overall.
Stephan’s blog has some of the soundest Vitamin K related posts around, if it can reverse arterial calcification and improve the pathways for absorption of other critical nutrients, perhaps it can results in a slightly sharper and better functioning brain:
https://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/latest-study-on-vitamin-k-and-coronary.html
The effect of butter is so large and fast I find it hard to believe it is due to a micronutrient, such as Vitamin K2. But time will tell.
Have I considered high vitamin butter oil? thanks for the suggestion. to answer your question: not explicitly. So far I haven’t tried even one variation. I’m trying to figure out why my reaction time became much lower soon after I returned to China.
Mistake? –
“the reason butter was so helpful wasn’t anything as simple as animal fat is food for us”
You meant “good for us”?
Just FYI, I have a very high IQ (not bragging–high IQ and $2.00 gets you a latte), but very mediocre reaction time.
In that respect, I guess I’m an outlier.
Heh, maybe Advanced Glycation End-products are what’s speeding the brain in this case. Maybe it’s a reaction to damage.
One reason it matters so much: passing a threshold for all-or-nothing activities. If I could jump 5% higher, I might be able to dunk a basketball (ok, this is not true of me but it is of somebody). Dunking is an activity that is yes/no. If my kid had 5% quicker reaction times, he might be a striker instead of a defender.
I bet there are things like this in non-sports life all the time. If I could think 5% more quickly, that might make me comfortable enough with my speaking that I would be willing to challenge someone smart in a group with me who says something I disagree with.
After reading both answers, I am not convinced the quality of the answers is that striking. I sort of prefer the three part answer. I am partial to lists.