Last night I had dinner with a friend in a restaurant. We chatted with a couple sitting next to us. They asked what I did research about. “Food and the brain,” I said. “What foods make the brain work best.” They asked for an example. “ Butter,” I said. The woman smiled. “That’s great news! Butter is delicious.” As they left, the woman said, “I feel like I’ve learned some really interesting things.”

I agree, great news — partly because butter is delicious. Yet it fits what we already know. It’s been known since the 1920′s that a high-fat (“ketogenic”) diet can ameliorate childhood epilepsy. I suppose it’s called “ketogenic diet” to avoid the term high-fat – or to sound more “scientific”. It’s an unfortunate name because why the diet helps is unclear. “Although many hypotheses have been put forward to explain how the ketogenic diet works, it remains a mystery,” says Wikipedia.

Another example of dairy fat improving brain function comes from a little girl with a rare genetic disease:

A 3-year-old girl, . . . thanks to a diet of cream cheese, gained the ability to speak despite a disease that [had] left her mute from birth.

Fields Taylor, from Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, was born with the incurable genetic disease Glut 1 Deficiency that caused a lack of glucose to flow to her brain. Today, Taylor’s diet of four containers of the cream cheese per week gives her a voice. . . . ”The amount of Philadelphia [cream cheese] she goes through is mad but worth it. It really has been our saving grace. She loves the stuff and piles it on crackers,” The Mirror quoted her mother Stevie as saying. “The first time I heard Fields say ‘Mum’ it was just wonderful.” . . . Glut 1 affects just 26 people in the U.K.

Thanks to Tom George.

In Perfect Coffee at Home, authors Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez, who have started a digital publishing company, say that the Buttermind experiment influenced them to start adding butter to their coffee. In this excerpt, they say that their cholesterol went down 25 points during the period they drank it (their lives changed in many other ways at the same time). At the end they say:

Later, we would learn that Ethiopian warriors had drunk buttered coffee to energize before battle as far back as 600 CE. But that was after we had stopped regularly drinking it. When we transitioned out of the Marine Corps and our days became less frenetic, it just didn’t seem as necessary.

The mention of Ethiopian warriors reminds me of how, after discovering that pork fat (from pork belly) improves my sleep, I learned that Mao Tse-Tung praised a certain pork-belly dish (红烧肉), calling it “brain food”. I don’t drink coffee but I have tried tea with butter. It tasted good, but I didn’t like the residue it left on the tea cup. Cream doesn’t leave a residue. I haven’t noticed that butter gives me energy. The benefits I believe in are better brain function and better sleep. Maybe more calmness.

Based partly on my research, a friend of mine started eating the same amount of butter I do: 4 tablespoons (about 60 g) per day. He described what happened:

I’m noticably smarter since I started butter. Immediately.

Faster insights, faster foreign language processing, increased creativity, faster at math-in-my-head. My video-gaming ability is better, which partly is a measure of my reaction time. Since I log my creativity similarly to my workouts I can view the increased production.

Started butter properly 3 days ago. Haven’t been sleeping well due to workload and digestive issues…yet still my performance keeps [improving]. I suspect it will be yet markedly better again once I get some proper rest.

I am experiencing creativity effects [similar to those] that resulted when I was mindhacking with various racetams along with sublutiamine and centrophenoxine. I have not been taking that brain-stack for a month because it was causing digestive problems. Suddenly with butter all the mind-hacking benefits have returned.

Because of my finding that butter improved my mental speed, in 2012, Dustin Lee, a programmer in Bozeman, Montana, decided to try eating lots of butter. He thought he’d do it for a month.

He ate a half-stick (2 ounces = 57 grams) every day. Nothing fancy: Kirkland Salted Sweet Cream Butter. At first it was repulsive. He had trouble eating it. He ate it with other foods, such as soup or pancakes. Or he would take lots of tiny slices (without other foods). It felt like more butter than he wanted.

After about two weeks of this, however, he decided this is pretty good. He was enjoying it. He began looking forward to the slices. He made them larger. He prefers the butter hard, straight out of the fridge. He now enjoys eating the fat on meat. He stopped limiting how much animal fat he eats. (His wife still cuts it off meat.) Now he gets lots of fat from lots of sources. Butter is the easiest source.

His children (7 and 9 years old) don’t eat butter directly, but he allows them to eat as much as they want. They eat a lot more butter than other children. At other people’s houses, he jokes about it. Incidentally, he tried taking Vitamin D3 in the morning (around 7 am) but it made him so sleepy in the evening he stopped.

This impressed me. I’d been eating a half-stick of butter per day for a few years (half as much was less effective), but I always ate it with a little bit of meat, e.g., sliced roast beef (Berkeley) or roast pork (Beijing). That was less than ideal because I kept running out of the meat. I started eating it Dustin’s way (straight) and found it’s fine. It’s like dessert, halfway between ice cream and cheese.