Is Butter Healthy?

After a few decades of the demonization of butter and other natural animal fats, butter is slowly making it’s way back into health conscious people’s diets.

To learn more about some of the absurd stuff that led to the anti-butter and dairy movement, I recommend this book:

The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid

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Butter is healthy, yes. In fact, it’s one of the better sources of dietary fat.

If you have health problems that affect digestion, it’s also one of the easier fats to digest.

Because the focus of this site is gluten free diets, digestibility is important to mention. Digestive problems are fairly common in gluten sensitive people, even if the symptoms aren’t always overt. Butter can therefore be an enjoyable part of a healing protocol. More on this later.

Lactose Intolerant?

No problem. Butter contains very little lactose.

But if you want no lactose at all, you can eat butter in the form of ghee, and cheese that is lactose free.

Ghee is butter that has been gently heated for a long time so the water in it evaporates (butter can contain up to 15% water) and the fat and wee bits of milk solids separate.

The browned milk sugars and protein portion is discarded, or used for something else (it tastes very good!). The pure fat that remains is ghee.

You can make ghee at home. Google for recipes.

I made my own ghee in the past. I even made ghee from goat butter! I like and tolerate this product far better:

Pure Indian Foods Ghee – From 100% grass fed cows. My favorite!

Pure Indian Foods Ghee is the best tasting ghee I’ve ever had. It’s slightly sweet in taste, yet strongly buttery. A little goes a long way to flavor foods. The price is actually very good, particular given the health benefits of the 100% grass fed dairy it’s made from. And the people who run the company are excellent and very nice. I had friendly email exchanges with one of them.

Ghee is also a superb fat to cook with. You can safely deep fry foods in ghee! Healthy fried foods? Yes! Because butter is a stable fat to start with, and ghee removes the portions of butter that burn easily, you can cook ghee at high temperature without burning it.

High Quality Butter

Look for the product below at your supermarket, or request that your grocer brings it in, or buy it online via the links below:

Kerry Gold Irish Butter

From 100% grass-fed cows. You can buy it here

It’s famously good, often preferred by chefs, and very healthful thanks to how the cows are fed. Kerry Gold also makes fantastic cheese, like their Dubliner Irish Cheddar.

And they are nice folks, too. I had a lively and fun email exchange with one of their reps.

That said, if you can get raw butter from 100% grass fed cows from a good local dairy/farm, that may be even bettter. To find sources in your country click here

Butter is Healthy: 5 Great Benefits

1. Excellent Source of Vital Vitamins A, K, and D

Butter contains 3 of the most beneficial, crucial vitamins for health: vitamins A, K, and D. These vitamins work together – each one is needed to balance the other and benefit the body.

These vitamins are critical for eye function, protein utilization, the immune system (vitamin A helps to produce disease-fighting white blood cells  – white blood cells are essential for preventing infection), skin and bone development, blood clotting, gum health, mood and more.

Special Note: If you have Crohn’s disease, Celiac disease, gluten intolerance or any malabsorption problem:

Malabsorption can result in vitamin A and D deficiency, among other deficiencies, even if you are getting ample in your diet. An up-to-date, savvy doctor who treats these conditions will know to check A and D levels. If your doctor hasn’t, request them to see where you’re at, or find an independent lab and arrange for the tests yourself.

Butter can be a great, safe way to get vitamin A, D and K, whether you’re deficient or not.

Vitamin A Toxicity?

You shouldn’t fear getting too much vitamin A in butter or other whole foods like eggs, or even a few servings of liver a week (okay, I don’t like liver, but some people love it). Because vitamins A, D and K and other nutrients are found together in these foods to balance things, toxicity is not a concern. You would have to eat a crazy amount of these natural foods to get too much of these vitamins, or have a rare disorder of some kind that results in a bad reaction to them.

Problems with toxicity with vitamin A seem to come from taking large doses of synthetic forms of vitamin A alone (either added to foods or in supplements, or in drugs like Accutane) or “natural” forms alone, without the proper balance of vitamin D and K and other nutrients to protect the body from toxicity, as are found in foods.

3. Source of Easy to Digest, Healthful MCTs

MCT stands for medium chain triglyceride.

This special form of fat is found in only a small number of foods – foods that have been consumed by some of the healthiest groups of people for thousands of years, but far less in recent modern times, to the detriment of health sadly.

MCTs don’t require bile acids for digestion. MCTs are a good source of easily digestible energy. MCTs are often  used in the liquid formulas fed to patients that have had sections of their intestine removed and aren’t able to digest solid food.

Fats that contain MCTs, like butter, can be a good choice for people with malabsorption syndromes.

MCTs are also a source of lauric acid, which has anti-bacterial, anti-viral and antioxidant properties.

Coconut (click on this link to see my post on coconut oil) and natural dairy foods like butter are among the best sources of MCT.

4.  Natural and Not Filled with Omega-6!

Unlike new fangled fats like margarine, butter is a natural food with a long history of safe use by humans.

Butter is also low in omega-6 – a fatty acid people get far too much of in modern times thanks mostly to the use of unhealthy vegetable oils like soy oil.

5. Tastes Good

A healthy food that also tastes good? Yes, butter is exactly that. Putting a bit of butter on your food has health benefits and an incredible enjoyment factor at the same time.

Back in my gluten days, one of the worst offenders taste-wise was shortbread made with margarine instead of butter.  Vile! haha.

In sum, butter, or butter in the form of ghee is a great food for human health.  It’s full of nutrients, helps with absorption, has beneficial fats, is natural and has a long, safe, glorious history of use by humans.