- Are we all getting a little bit
carried away with health foods?
I mean, 11 million results for the search term
"super foods" would suggest so.
So just what foods do not deserve their health halo?
(dinging)
I actually asked numerous experts
and authorities in the nutrition space,
what they felt were the
most overrated health foods right now.
And three people that I highly respect
all said that butter was the most overrated health food,
or they said that bulletproof coffee
was the most overrated health food,
which is essentially when you put butter in your coffee.
Just how could that be healthy?
Let's start with butter
and why it does not deserve its health halo.
It's been all over the media lately.
Eat butter.
Stop worrying about cholesterol.
Fat is back.
We now see that butter isn't so bad after all,
and the healthiness of margarine was oversold really.
And you know what?
I agree, I think butter is
probably healthier than margarine,
and it's not the dietary demon that we once thought,
but just because butter is better than margarine
doesn't then make butter healthy.
Butter is still an isolated fat
that provides astoundingly little nutrition
relative to its energy density.
So the trade-off of nutrients for calories
is really a really bad deal.
Saying that butter is healthy
because it's better than margarine
is like comparing honey with sugar.
Honey has some trace nutrients and compounds
that arguably make it a better choice than table sugar,
but that doesn't mean honey is healthy,
it just means that honey is better than table sugar.
Smoking menthol cigarettes
may be better than smoking regular cigarettes,
but it's still not good for you.
Butter may be better than margarine,
but in the end it's still additional fat,
and it's still additional calories.
Okay, so what if you're not worried
about the excess calories?
What's the problem with butter then?
Well if we look at it from a
nutrition science point of view,
a high intake of butter can negatively affect the ratio
of lipoproteins in your blood,
which increases your risk of heart disease.
And it's not the saturated fat in butter
that we're worried about,
which is no longer thought of
as a direct cause of heart disease.
The problem with butter is that
it's low in milk fat globule membrane.
This protective membrane encloses the fatty acids
in high-fat dairy products such as cream,
which, in turn, seems to reduce
the cholesterol-raising effects of its fatty acids.
Now butter is just cream that has been churned,
and the churning process destroys much of this membrane.
The result is that butter can increase
the amount of LDL particles in your bloodstream,
which are a really strong
predictor of cardiovascular disease,
and every expert can agree on that fact.
Okay, so how do we know this is actually the case though?
Well, there has been a lot of studies on it,
and the very latest one out of Sweden,
which I first came across
on the membership site Science of Diet,
found that dairy fat from butter
raised some heart disease risk factors
much more than dairy fat from cream.
Now to test this, the researchers randomly assigned
57 overweight men and women to consume either
40 grams of milk fat as whipped cream per day,
or 40 grams as butter for an eight-week period,
and as expected the LDL particle number of the butter group
showed up significantly more than the cream group.
Now for this reason, our portions of butter intake
need to be carefully monitored.
No one actually knows what happens
when you consume large amounts of butter
over long periods of time,
such as if you're adding sticks of butter
to your coffee every morning.
(wretching)
Even for those who subscribe to the
ancestral, or all-natural nutrition approach,
having butter several times per day
is much more than we ever would have had
throughout our evolution.
So what should we be eating instead?
Well, extra virgin olive oil
should always be your go-to cooking oil,
or oil in general.
That's not to say you can't use butter.
I use butter quite often in cooking,
especially if I cook eggs,
because they taste amazing,
but if you're eating butter, or more butter, to be healthy,
then you've been duped.
If you found this video useful, please give it a thumbs up,
and I'll see you next time.