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Comment by jelliclesfarm | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing wrong with butter. Oils can become rancid. Clarified butter or ghee is even better as they have longer shelf life.

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It's an animal product with the obvious ethics problems and cow methane boosting the co2 footprint.

However, it's delicious, comes in stick form, doesn't separate or spoil when I leave it out in a dish at room temperature, and can keep that way long enough for it to be used entirely.

No mediocre substitute holds up to real butter, cow farts and ethics be damned.

This is coming from someone who thought Country Crock was real butter until I was a teenager, because that's what my mother always bought.

I can't even put it in macaroni and cheese these days, let alone on my toast.

Even the expensive stuff like "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" is nearly repulsive compared to real butter IMO.

Latter problem can be solved by feeding the cows tiny amounts of seaweed

But would a feed lot likely do that? I doubt it.

And speaking of feed lots ... eeyew.

> It's an animal product

For which you don't kill the animal.

> with the obvious ethics problems

This may or may not be "obvious" decades or more in the future, but I think people who hold this idea are in the minority at the moment.

> cow methane

Point taken.

> For which you don't kill the animal.

Milk cows are continually raped for the duration of their lives: http://www.humanemyth.org/happycows.htm

> Milk cows are continually raped for the duration of their lives

This is misleading and utter bullshit (no pun intented). By that reasoning, every routine examination at the gynecologist or proctologist would constitute rape.

We have no reason to suspect that a cow feels "raped" during artificial insemination, or anything more than slight physical discomfort.

Your argument is basically "if it feels good, it's not rape." Disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself.

> Your argument is basically "if it feels good, it's not rape."

No, you're misreading my post. My argument boils down to "Stop projecting complex human emotions onto bovines without evidence."

> For which you don't kill the animal.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I thought dairy necessitated pregnancy, and as such went hand in hand with veal production. Is this incorrect? Input from someone with experience in the domain would be helpful.

(I've googled it but the sources primarily seem to be extremely biased).

IME most people, if they look into it, find ethical problems in industrial dairy/beef production. Maybe most don't care or muster discipline enough to change their consumption, but that is different from thinking it's all fine.

A drive to a store to buy oil has a larger co2 footprint than the butter producing cow. That make the butter eating cyclist a more ethical person than a oil buying driver, if we are going to argue co2 footprints.

A 500 g packet of butter has a footprint of 4.7 kg of CO2 equivalent. If a car does 200 grams of CO2e / km, distance by car on the store trip would have to be over 23 km to match the butter.

Most atmospheric methane produced photo oxidizes to CO2 after about 20 years though.

CH4 + 2O2 -photons---> C02 + 2H20

I'm not sure what time scale of heat per mass equivalencies are based on in your example; there is approximately 28 : 1 heat/mass eq. ratio at the 100 year scale, during which time the heating effect decreases exponentially with the decrease in methane concentration[0]. After 100 years the ratio is approximately 1:1 since almost all methane has decomposed.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

20 years is a very relevant timescale since we need to prevent the tipping point of melting artcitc methane deposits and loss of reflection from permafrost areas.

Yea, I agree. Cows also live about 20 years, so even not breeding cows wouldn't solve this problem. The morality of eating butter is kind of a moot point when all the production mechanisms are already in place and they aren't flexible.

A possible solution would be methane fixing bacteria (methanotrophs) in the guts of cows or in the ocean where > 75% of the current concentration atmospheric methane originates. The ocean also contains a significant amount in solid form that gets released as temps rise. [0]

[0]http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/12/09/warmer-pacific-oce...

Cows can live that long but after production drops (about 4 years) they will be sold off for beef. Not breeding cows would definitely help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_cattle lists a few sources for the 4 years figure.

I don't wish to argue (I'm a butter eating cyclist after all!) but this seems to be selective, since cows are more known for producing methane than co2 ?

If I recall right, they producer more co2 than methane by a factor of 2. A better measurement is pollution, but then we would need to attribute all the particles which makes it more complex to compare the burning of fossil fuels with gas produce by fermentation.

Not to say that I am not a fan of less selective counting. I in big favor of counting footprint based on a person complete effect on the environment rather than specific choices. If we counted everything from purchases of items, clothes, travel, commuting, diet, and so on, I am convinced that the end result is more enlightening than just looking one diet item vs an other.

That's the rationale for the concept of CO2e, the amount of CO2 that is equivalent to the emission. So emitting 1 kg of CO2 and 1 kg of a GHG that is 2x as potent as CO2 would be expressed as emissions of "3 kg CO2e".

There is: Butter contains 3 % trans fats. And even keto fanatics admit that trans fats are extremely unhealthy. You could say it doesn't have a huge impact and that might be true because it's only a small part of the diet.

However, any amount of trans fat is dangerous. The body's enzymes can hardly remove any trans fat build up in the arteries.

> Butter contains 3 % trans fats

Source?

Normally I am all for asking for sources, but this isn't really in dispute nor hard to find. Just one of a thousand sources:

"50% of the fat content in butter is saturated fat and 4% is trans fat."

https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/healthy-eating/food-and-n...

Trans fat from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is (mostly) Elaidic acid, which is probably harmful. Butter contains other trans fats, like Vaccenic acid. We don't know much about the long-term health effects of Vaccenic acid.

"Published data suggest that all fatty acids with a double bond in the trans configuration raise the ratio of plasma LDL to HDL cholesterol."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2830458/

> Butter contains 3 % trans fats.

_No_ it does not. Trans fats are a completely artificial creation originally thought to avoid weight gain because it's specifically _not_ butter. They don't exist naturally in any butter.

The Google Instant answer for the question [does butter contain trans fat?] says 100 g butter contains 3.3 g of trans fat.

http://imgur.com/a/i7qw0

Trans fats sometimes occur naturally in food. They're created by bacteria in an animal's stomach.

Trans fats were nothing to do with weight loss. Trans fats were used because they're cheap and have long shelf life.

Yes they do contain trans fats - just not the same kind - and recent research shows that they are probably just as damaging as the artificial creations. See my comment to the other poster.

From the studies I can Google, the jury still seems to be out on the dominated trans fat in animal sources, vaccenic acid, and related compounds known as conjugated linoleic acids. The later group of trans fats actually might be beneficial to human health: some studies have linked it to anti-cancer properties (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4964663/) and fat loss (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/85/5/1203.long), although as indicated studies are very preliminary at the moment, so you really can't conclude anything definitely about this.

I can even Google papers such as this -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19935865 -- that seem to say vaccenic acid might not be that bad, which is contrary to the link you provided. Again -- this is more not to say vaccenic acid is good, and more that I believe the science is inconclusive right now.

Elaidic acid (the "bad" partially hydrogenated vegetable oil trans fat) is present in natural sources as well, but in much smaller quantities.

Small amounts of trans fats are pretty much found in any animal product, so it is difficult to avoid trans fats entirely unless you become completely vegan. Personally... my guess is that a small amount of animal based trans fat is not going to be a big deal overall, so a little butter is fine. The studies are most damning at the moment over partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

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