Since I discovered that butter makes my brain work better, I have been eating half a stick (60 g) per day. Usually half in the morning and half in the evening. It is hard to eat by itself but easy to eat with other foods. I’ve tried a dozen ways of doing this. My top three additions:
1. Pu’er tea. The most convenient. As convenient as drinking tea. Put the butter in hot tea, wait till it melts. I can eat at least 20 g of butter in one cup of tea. Butter tea is common in Tibet. Thanks again to Robin Barooah.
2. Cherry tomatoes. The healthiest and fastest. Slice the tomatoes in half lengthwise, eat each half with a similar-sized piece of butter. It is like that classic Italian combination, mozzarella and tomatoes.
3. Thin-sliced roast beef. The most delicious. Wrap a piece of butter with the roast beef. However, I already eat plenty of meat, it is hard to get thin-sliced roast beef in Beijing, and it is so delicious I end up buying a lot of thin-sliced roast beef.
None of these additions affects brain function (measured by arithmetic score), as far as I can tell, although I suppose the tea wakes me up.
I eat plenty butter, too. Only what’s called “organic” in America, from cows living as free/natural as possible.
The dentist that traveled the world, to find out why actually his patients had bad teeth – turned out because of wrong food:
https://www.westonaprice.org/
Seth, have you tried eating more (or less) butter each day? Have you learned anything interesting about the dose response?
Cheers,
Tom
I tried the butter in tea, and did not like it, but I tried butter in coffee and loved it (I love heavy cream in coffee anyway, the butter just intensifies that). I also love a thin slice of sharp cheddar matched with a slice of cold butter.
And this may amuse you: when I was a boy, I loved cold butter wrapped around a pickle…umami and butter. Haven’t tried that in years.
Tom, not yet. Eventually.
Butter is very pleasant to eat by itself if you take miniscule bites and let it melt a little – it’s not all that pleasant to eat fast in big mouthfulls.
I recommend eating very buttery scrambled eggs in the morning. There’s hardly such a thing as ‘too’ buttery scrambled eggs.
Oh yeah, I also meant to point out that Indians use butter to cook with; a practice I adopted a few years ago. Many things like butter better than veg, sunflower or olive oil. I would be interested to know whether Indians show a traceable tendency to get heart-attacks due to all the butter/ghee – somehow I doubt it.
@G, I agree with how delicious letting a small pat of grass-fed butter melt in the mouth! Very sensual. And I’ve been cooking with Ghee and coconut oil exclusively for the past year or so. It’s as if these fats were meant to be used for cooking.
Some people can’t handle high lipid meals without going through a period where their blood becomes overloaded with fat, as illustrated at this web site from a clinical lab:
https://www.cdha.nshealth.ca/default.aspx?page=SubPage¢erContent.Id.0=21654&category.Categories.1=411
Just to play it safe, no matter how you eat your fat, it might be wise to have someone draw your blood after a meal to see if your body can handle the load….but especially those who eat butter with lots of carbs.
Seth: Have you tried experimenting with Ghee vs butter?
Aaron: My cooking fat list is lard, tallow, coconut oil, ghee, and butter
I had a cholesterol problem a while ago. So, I started eating oatmeal. Only thing is I can’t eat it without gobs of butter. People used to tell me I was defeating the purpose by putting butter on the oatmeal. Still, after a month or so, my cholesterol went down to about 149, the bad cholesterol went down and the good went up.
I agree about not eating a lot of carbs, though, because they tend to be loaded with the bad fats. My grandparents ate lots of butter and they both lived to their 80s, with no heart problems.
I haven’t tried Ghee. I have barely tried other brands.
Ghee isn’t a brand, per se. It is the Indian term for the type of clarified butter made and used in India.
@CTB,
I checked out the website to which you linked. Here’s what it had to say:
“What is lipemia?
Lipemia is defined as excess lipids or fats in the blood. Lipemic serum will appear turbid or milky.
What causes lipemia?
Lipemia is caused by a rise in chylomicrons following a meal containing fat.
How does lipemia interfere?
The large particles causing lipemia will interfere with instrument methods that are based on light detection or scatter. Again, it is the responsibility of the Medical Laboratory Technologist to report any findings of lipemia so that results can be interpreted with this in mind.
How can lipemia be avoided?
In some cases Lipemia can be avoided simply by having the patient fast for 8 hours prior to the sample being drawn. In disease processes where the liver is unable to remove the chylomicrons from the blood, the appearance of lipemic serum may be unavoidable.”
So it looks to me that this is not a health problem but a measurement problem that the site is discussing. I’ve not come across any medical literature showing adverse health outcomes with consuming a high-fat meal. Can you provide any such references if you know of them?
Thanks,
Aaron
Aaron,
I purposely used the lab website because it showed the difference between normal and fatty (lipemic) sera while remaining ‘neutral.’ The lab is only interested in getting samples that can be accurately tested; i.e., there is no one trying to convert you to eat a particular diet (as for instance at this site):
https://www.newveg.av.org/optimum.htm
where the doctor is trying to find converts for vegetarianism. I was trying to avoid sensationalism, while providing a verbal illustration of what happens physiologically after a fatty meal, as well as a picture.
Heart attacks happen for many reasons. Sometimes arterial plaques rupture and pieces travel in the blood until they reach an area of the heart vaculature with a smaller diameter that they can then block. Many times heart attacks occur in people without known risk factors. In many of these cases a blood clot formed somewhere in the body and then traveled to one of the coronary arteries and blocked it. It’s known that high blood fat triggers increases in clotting factors.
In this study, people (normals and heart patients) were fed high fat meals…and then were studied in the hours afterward:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16730815
The conclusion: “Fat-rich meals may cause procoagulant episodes, which may promote vascular complications such as myocardial infarction, transient ischemia attacks in susceptible persons.”
My concern is whether or not I’m a susceptible person. Studies like this one were prompted by stories of when and where cardiac events occured. Heart attacks often occur in the hours after a large meal…ditto for attacks of angina/ischemia (chest pain). If fatty meals can raise pro-coagulant levels, maybe it’s best to spread it out over the day rather than eating large amounts in one sitting. Perhaps it’s like those old math problems with the bath tubs…water going in a a certain rate…water draining out at another rate. If your ability to drain the tub is compromised by age, illness, whatever, then adjust the rate by which you’re filling the tub.
Ghee is what results when you melt butter and skim the surface. It is more neutral-tasting than butter so better for things that don’t like to be buttery. And I think it may have a higher smoke-point. I would cook certain curries in ghee rather than butter; I would not cook an omelette in ghee rather than butter. I haven’t tried ghee on nontypical things like stir-fries because I easily use up any ghee I buy on curries – I tend to the principle that there are oils best suited to different dishes and I wouldn’t avoid sunflower oil where it’s the best culinary option; I would just avoid eating sunflower oil meals on a daily basis. Maybe once a week, I don’t expect to die of that.
@CTB,
I read the meal they fed their participants in that study to which you linked, and while it does indeed seem to contain a lot of fat, it also contains a lot of sugar (mousse au chocolate) and starch (potato dumplings, rye bread, for example). Thus, the meal was confounding multiple macronutrients and so there is no way to disentangle the effects of dietary lipids per se from the other macronutrients.
I’d really like to see the diet/health medical or scientific studies move away from lumping fat and sugar in their “fast food” or “fatty food” meals experiments/epidemiologies. You should read some of the posts at hyperlipid blog (https://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/). He presents a lot of good evidence against the notion that fat, even saturated fat contributes to atherosclerosis or MIs/strokes.
Aaron,
Thanks for the high-fat blog link. I agree with you about the diet in the study…but most people eat a mix of fat/sugar/starch/protein, so that’s where they’re focused for now. Even so, that diet might be OK if the total energy consumed equals the daily energy output. For example, people/animals who are hyperthyroid convert increased amounts of sugar to fat in the liver (and dump it into the blood)…but they have reduced body stores of fat because their metabolism is causing the tissues to suck up the fat and burn it for fuel instead of storing it (and their cholesterol stays quite low).
Digested protein and starch/sugar goes from the intestine to the liver after a meal, but fat goes from the intestine to lymph vessels and directly into the large veins leading to the heart…then to the lungs…then back to the heart for circulation to the whole body (including the liver). The tissues suck up what they need for storage or fuel. If there’s insulin around from eating sugars, fat burning is decreased and more is stored. And in addition, sugars are converted to fats and dumped into the blood as well. But in either case, what’s at issue here, for me, is how fast can you clear your blood of the fat that gets dumped into it after a meal?
Here’s an analogy: Near where I live, there’s a flood-prone area that took a big hit two years in a row (two ‘storms of the century’). Then last week, the area got hit with two back-to-back tropical storms…8-12+ inches in 48 hours. Usually the rivers rise…then crest 1-2 days later as the runoff continues to feed them. But this time, the rivers immediately receded when the rain stopped and major flooding didn’t occur. It was because we’ve had a drought all summer, the water tables were low, and rain that fell on the dry ground was absorbed instead of running off.
If you’re clearing your blood of the fat load after a meal quickly enough, no problem. As you age, metabolism slows as muscle mass declines; demand for fuel is less, blah, blah. Other people have genetic factors which might subject them to added stress after a fatty meal. For example, the Framingham study showed increased cardiac events in men with above normal hemoglobin. This usually means they have increased red blood cell counts, so their blood is more viscous (they are encouraged to donate blood often). Adding a big fat dump to already ‘thickened’ blood could interfer with oxygen gas diffusion from the lungs to the red cells and from the red cells to the tissues. Decreased oxygen tension…ischemia…can trigger cardiac events.
In a way, it’s like ‘no sex’ vs. ‘safe sex.’ One of the biggest mistakes this country ever made, IMHO, was promoting the use of margarine over butter…the other mistake was the low fat diet fad which spawned the low-fat/high carb food industry. But that doesn’t mean we can go to the other extreme and eat the old no-no foods as if there were no precautions needed.
“In a way, it’s like ‘no sex’ vs. ‘safe sex.”™”
IMAO, this isn’t the best analogy. The “safe sex” idea has led to an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, abortions, and out-of-wedlock births.
Seth – Does the butter need to be any particular kind? Will margarine work?
I have only used Straus Creamery Unsalted Butter. I doubt very much that margarine will work.
Margarine is something completely different and not related to butter in its essence. If you are interested in your health, avoid margarine at all cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine
@CTB, I see. It seems you are suggestion that a high-fat meal can be a problem in the context of eating a SAD (Standard American Diet) which is heavily skewed towards grains (especially refined), sugar, and industrially-processed oils. I don’t doubt that this type of diet may increase the problem of eating a meal with a large amount of even healthy fats as the person’s system will likely already be compromised by metabolic syndrome.
For those of us who follow a more ancestral diet (e.g., paleo, primal, even Weston Price) do not seem to be negatively affected by high-fat meals.
> I would be interested to know whether Indians show a traceable tendency to
> get heart-attacks due to all the butter/ghee – somehow I doubt it.
Far be it from me to talk anyone here out of your daily butter-stick, but let me assure you that heart disease is widespread among middle-class Indians. In fact, it’s pretty much the rule.
A quick google search tells me that India, with a fifth of the world’s population, accounts for more than half of the world’s heart disease. Pretty impressive for a poor country where many people don’t get enough to eat (let alone “excess” fat) and have a hundred other life threatening diseases to worry about.
Why are we all trying to eat sticks of butter?
Heated butter provides the same benefit as chilled butter, I assume?