Butter consumption and chronic disease

For years, we were all convinced that butter is the devil reincarnate dressed in deliciousness. The saturated fats in butter were believed to pave the path to cardiovascular disease and early death.

The news that this is not so has been dribbling out for some time now and has just been reinforced by researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston and Jason HY Wu and Hila Haskelberg, both from The George Institute for Global Health, University of Sydney.

In fact, it seems that butter may actually provide some (albeit slight) protection against the development of diabetes, is not associated with cardiovascular disease and is only weakly associated with total mortality.

Through a systematic review and search of multiple online academic and medical databases, the research team identified nine eligible research studies, including 15 country-specific cohorts, representing 636,151 unique individuals with a total of 6.5 million person-years of follow-up. Over the total follow-up period, the combined group of studies included 28,271 deaths, 9783 cases of cardiovascular disease and 23,954 cases of type 2 diabetes. The researchers combined the nine studies into a meta-analysis of relative risk.

Butter consumption was standardised across all nine studies to 14 g/day, which corresponds to one US Department of Agriculture estimated serving of butter. Overall, the average butter consumption across the nine studies ranged from roughly one-third of a serving per day to 3.2 servings per day. The study found mostly small or insignificant associations of each daily serving of butter with total mortality, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

“Even though people who eat more butter generally have worse diets and lifestyles, it seemed to be pretty neutral overall,” said researcher Laura Pimpin. “This suggests that butter may be a middle-of-the-road food: a more healthful choice than sugar or starch, such as the white bread or potato on which butter is commonly spread and which have been linked to higher risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and a worse choice than many margarines and cooking oils — those rich in healthy fats such as soybean, canola, flaxseed and extra virgin olive oils — which would likely lower risk compared with either butter or refined grains, starches and sugars.”

“Overall, our results suggest that butter should neither be demonised nor considered ‘back’ as a route to good health,” said researcher Dariush Mozaffarian. “More research is needed to better understand the observed potential lower risk of diabetes, which has also been suggested in some other studies of dairy fat. This could be real or due to other factors linked to eating butter — our study does not prove cause and effect.”

The team’s study has been published in the journal PLOS One.