Researchers have found more evidence that butter is heart-healthy | Hacker News Reader

Researchers have found more evidence that butter is heart-healthy

qz.com

82 pointsprostoalex71 comments

Could we get a less audacious title? The article's about how butter appears to be healthier than corn oil -- and that, in general, the health differences between butter and linoleic-acid-based vegetable oils may be a wash. This is pretty interesting, but it doesn't upend the apple cart quite as comprehensively as the current title suggests.

Too late, I'm already drinking a cup of liquid butter to help my heart

Don't forget that sugar is the next superfood!

bulletproof coffee, hold the coffee

The previous discussion of this topic went with Replacing butter with vegetable oils does not cut heart disease risk (2016) even though the title of the Atlantic article was Is Vegetable Oil Really Better for Your Heart?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632116

The Quartz article, which was apparently posted today, talks about research published "this week", but it links the same research article from April 2016 as the Atlantic article.

That sounds like a better title, at least IMHO... I didn't realize this had been discussed recently. (Wait, "recently" as in "yesterday"? Is this article just a duplicate?)

(As for which fats to use, I figure olive oil used in modest quantities probably can't hurt me, so I'll stick to that for cooking at the moment.)

It even seems to be a sort of meta duplicate where the Quartz article was born because the topic was getting attention.

I would recommend avocado oil for cooking, and olive oil for salads etc. Avocado oil has a much higher smoke point, so it makes for easier cooking and fewer carcinogens.

Olive oil is fine for cooking as long as you're constantly moving it (e.g. sauté, stir fry, etc), because then it never gets a chance to really heat up beyond its smoke point. It's not great for deep frying or foods that you leave in the pan, like steak or seared fish (unless you get refined olive oil, but then what's the point?).

That said, I second the recommendation for avocado oil for general cooking.

Is there any evidence that people following your advice die less? Italian cooking involves frying stuff in olive oil all the time, without smoking it.

I don't see the title as particularly objectionable, but given that this topic was discussed just yesterday, we'll probably treat the current post as a dupe.

"The subjects were broken into two groups. One was given a diet in which liquid corn oil was used in place of usual hospital cooking fats (including butter and hydrogenated oils) during meal preparation. The other group received meals cooked with common margarines and shortening. "

Where is butter in this study?Am I missing something?

Butter is a type of shortening, but I don't know why it's phrased like that. The actual study mentions butter: http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246

Ok thanks. The way it's worded it still sounds like the group was a butter/margarine mix, so not a clean comparison.

I'm not sure the study had much to do with butter. It mentions butter just once but leaves it very unclear how much butter was actually involved (versus "shortening").

The study talks extensively about "shortening" which is primarily a vegetable-based product now AFAIK. FWIW, the Wikipedia article tells us "the term "shortening" seldom refers to butter, but is more closely related to margarine."

Yeah it's very confusing. Maybe these words meant something different in 1968.

On a side note, there's more than one kind of butter. I hate mainstream US dairy products; most of them are from Holstein cows which have the highest milk production of any breed but whose milk tastes insufferably bland to me. If you can get milk from Jersey cows, the difference is like night and day - much higher butterfat content.

Try Kerrygold, 100% grass-fed and grass-finished...or the U.S. equivalent. You'll never go back.

I'd second this!

First time I bought some from Costco, my family asked why my food was so delicious. It's not even much more expensive than regular butter.

And I'll third it! As an Irishman living abroad I find most local butters extremely tasteless. Luckily it's not too hard to find Kerrygold in most supermarkets in the UK.

That's exactly what I had in mind but I didn't want to sound like a butter commercial XD

I grew up with it and I'm baffled by what passes for butter in the American market. We probably spend twice as much on food as is average for the amount we consume, but it seems both tastier and healthier. Part of why I have negative opinions of capitalism is the inescapable fact that the baseline of food quality is so bad. The most popular and well-known food brands, which take up the most shelf space in most supermarkets and are thus the default choice for many consumers are just awful. They're somewhat-to-direly awful nutritionally, they don't taste good, and many people are so conditioned to sugar and artificial flavors that they find real food weird at first.

I feel like this is a serious social problem. What seems like a large majority of Americans don't know how to eat well and this causes all kinds of second-order problems - not just things like obesity and diabetes, but things like criminal recidivism too. The idea of nutrition and healthy eating in prisons is treated by most people as a contradiction in terms, as if diet didn't have any impact on self-control, learning ability and other factors that are likely to impact future behavior. (This is sadly far from an exclusively American problem.) When people aren't properly nourished they under stress and when they're under stress they make poor decisions.

lower middle class and struggling people can't afford to eat well and don't have the time to cook. this probably won't change for another 30 years. sadly, most will probably die before this problem is fully addressed.

don't worry, all the rich educated people already know exactly what the deal is. just take a look at any expensive restaurant menu or high end supermarket in california, texas, new york, etc.

From what I've seen, most simply don't have the desire to eat well, nor learn how to do so affordably. Sure, they cannot eat grass-fed beef with sweet potatoes, wild mushrooms, and asparagus, but they can eat rice, microwaved green peas and a couple eggs with hot sauce, and still have a nutritionally complete meal. Cheaper and faster than any fastfood. McDonald's arguably tastes better, though.

Nope. You can eat healthy even if you're poor; it's just more boring and repetitive. Most of what I know about nutrition and cooking I learned in high school, which was a) long ago and b) nothing fancy by American standards. I make a fuss about this stuff because I've got a lot of experience of being poor and I'm keenly aware of the tricky challenges of making food choices when you have very little money.

I'd ask for a refund on that snide tone if I were you, it's not helping your argument.

Kerrygold's cheese and butter are amazing.

Intrigued but skeptical. There's really a taste difference? How do you account for that? Isn't butter just fat and water? I eat lots of butter, but I've never shopped around. The only label comparison I ever did was when I saw Plugra on the shelves and I went to check if it had a different butterfat content from store-brand butter. (As the name would imply.) It didn't, and I bought store-brand.

Butter isn't a chemical mixture. It's a food made from a living animal. As with all things in nature, it will vary depending on the animal and its health. This kind of reductionist and industrial attitude towards food is detrimental to nutrition and overall. In our aim to standardize everything, we've forgotten the animals and the farmers and our connection to food. In an agricultural society you would have been laughed at if you said "isn't all butter the same?"

Well, I have nothing to go on but the label, which is reductionist in the extreme. Which is why I ask what the difference is. I'm really most interested in the qualitative difference, not the exact amino acid composition. Sibling comments inform me that Kerrygold is more delicious than what my grocer stocks. In what way? What is different about the manner in which it's produced?

Most dairy cows in Ireland (where Kerrygold comes from) are Jersey cows, the fat content of whose milk is higher to start with, which makes it smoother and gives it a yellower color. There's also a little more salt in it, I think.

But as I said the label will only take you so far. If you want to know what something tastes like you need to put it in your mouth and chew it for a while. If you're not willing to experiment then you're going to miss out on all kinds of delicious things. The price of sometimes buying things and discovering that you don't enjoy them is well worth it.

What's "just fat"? "fat" is a term for a whole category of things (esters of glycerol and fatty acids), not just one specific substance, and fat in butter contains all kinds of trace stuff that isn't strictly a "fat molecule".

This baffles me. How on earth are you going to know whether you might prefer eating something without trying it? The Nutrition Facts label isn't going to tell you how it tastes. I love those labels and refer to them regularly but reading too much into it is like trying to figure out someone's personality from their height, weight and other basic statistics.

Lurpak is another good option.

The best butter I've ever had is Smjor from Iceland. It's incredible. Even compared to Kerrygold. Whole Foods sometimes had it. When available we usually buy very large quantities of it.

Now I'm tempted!

> much higher butterfat content

That'll certainly make a substantial difference in flavour for most dairy products --- other than, I suspect, for butter (what's it gonna be, 81% instead of 79%? ;)

My stance has always been that butter is so delicious that I am willing to accept a reasonable amount of risk, whereas I find margarine so foul that I would rather eat food without any fat than consume it.

Amusingly, I quit butter for that reason. I had a major health scare just over a year ago, and despite being skeptical of dietary advice in general, I decided that at least I could lose weight. So I cut butter out of my diet. The result was that I ate a lot less food overall, because it eliminated most of my favorite snacks, such as buttered toast. Sure, I missed it, but I've gotten slimmed down, and am having no problem keeping it off so far. It took months, but the day arrived when I actually enjoyed a piece of toast with no butter!

So, this has more to do with me hacking my own brain, than about any sort of nutritional science.

Rye/spelt sourdough toast with no butter is delicious. I'll also add a little olive oil and salt.

In my case, I lost the weight by eliminating a lot of carbohydrates from my diet. The only way I would bother touching a piece of bread would be if it was unusually delicious.

For me, butter was the lubricant for stuffing myself with carbohydrates.

First salt, and now butter? How long until we find out sugar is a super food?

Sugar was the default super food for decades as a result of the 70's and 80's push to lower dietary fat.

It's only been recently that the medical community has realized that sugar is actually the number one hidden danger in the modern diet.

In the 70s people were pushing "low-glycemic index" diets. That precludes sugar.

Different people that were pushing high carbs, though.

I remember all the talk about "carb loading" for athletes and how many people decided "If atheletes do it, I should do it too."

Those people did exist, but were largely ignored because the medical bureaucracy and Federal government got into the food pyramid and dietary guidelines business.

The real money for the food industry then became pursuing the low-fat diet.

> actually the number one hidden danger in the modern diet.

As opposed to a sedentary lifestyle spent passively consuming entertainment from the safety of environmentally controlled living spaces that requires little energy to be expended on any activities.

That theory does not stand the test of time or geography.

US obesity rates and dental problems started skyrocketing around war time, when sugar was introduced to soldiers' rations and by virtue of subsidies into mainstream diet. Many of life's comforts like cars or TV sets (and radios before them) were available in that era.

At the same time countries with low obesity rates exist today, and residents of Thailand, Moldova or Japan are not particularly deprived of cars, TVs or PCs, nor do they exert significant physical effort to hunt and gather their food.

On the other side of the spectrum, countries with high obesity rates (Mexico, Nauru, Cook Islands) are not particularly car-infested way way higher when compared to peers, nor do they have extreme TV/PC consumption numbers.

The only relevant variable seems to be the amount of sugar (consumed from all sources) in the diet.

The sedentary lifestyle theory does help sell fitness club memberships, though, so it's not completely useless.

You can't use possession of cars as a proxy for sedentaryness. If you look at the number of people on sidewalks in the US (approximately none) versus the number of people walking in Japan or Thailand, you'll see a stark contrast. In the US, people (myself included) will take a car to the grocery store a ten minute walk away. In most cities around the world you get used to walking places, but since it's rarely feasible to walk in the US, you get used to driving everywhere.

The closest they came to testing that hypothesis was to conduct surveys across residents of various countries, and it turns out the "laziest" countries are not the obesity leaders (although arguably laziness here is self-reported)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9405918/British-...

I don't know if anyone has good data on the amount of walking per capita per country. Maybe FitBit would have decent stats, but then their userbase is a bit self-selecting.

Sugar was being consumed just a heavily before the war. It only became a demonized, food shaming tool because of rationing propaganda that warned (read lied to) mothers of the dangers of too much sugar. Thus the fictitious "sugar high" was invented and seized upon by nutrition "experts" to build a massive industry that depends on playing the blame game on so called bad foods that get reshuffled each decade or so. Everyone is suckered into blaming their food rather than their behavior and the people making billions off of this scheme aren't about to reveal the truth.

> Sugar was being consumed just a heavily before the war

No. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-2606-us-die...

It was relatively hard to produce, expensive to import, and the scientists did not yet invent high-fructose corn syrup.

to think Woody Allen had it right with Sleeper. (movie where some previously bad foods/habits were good for you, and no I am not serious)

A lot of past recommendations were likely co-opted by whatever the industry was starting to push. Plus there was a tendency to focus on one issue to the point of ignoring side effects of correcting it.

i have been a fan of natural fats for a long time and never have cooked with fats other than animal, butter, or olive/avocado oils. I find most distressing are store bought salad dressings and any mass market vegetable oil. Sure it has its place, shortening is an absolute for some baking but the prevalence of it in about everything else is uncalled for.

Yet at the end of the day I always wonder, how do our genetics affect us? Smoking is bad yet lung cancer does not require it and there are smokers living to ripe old ages. Same for some old standard foods that current dieticians bemoan but I remember as staple of grandparents.

If they want to research they should research cultured butter. It was the traditional way to make butter. The culturing of the milk into yoghurt does change it.

Maybe butter's good but their accompanying picture is pancakes with syrup, as if that's ok to eat now as long as it has butter.

sounds like a plan to me - put butter on it makes it healthier!

Donuts? Butter glazed maybe! Fries? Fry em in butter! Starbucks? Instead of cream add butter! Forget the BigMac sauce I'll take butter!

Ironically putting butter in coffee is a thing now...in keto/paleo diets especially: http://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-deal-with-butter-in-coffe...

Hahah yeah they definitely had coffee with butter in it back in the hunter gatherer days.

One component of butter, butyrate, has been shown to have many health benefits. See e.g. [1] (not endorsing this reference, I just link to it because it was easy to find and it references a lot of relevant literature).

[1] https://selfhacked.com/2016/05/07/health-benefits-butyrate-d...

Butter may be healthful! (In a comparison with another believed to be unhealthful dietary choice)

Corn oil has a very high Omega6:Omega3 ratio.

There is quite a bit of evidence to support that a diet rich in animal fats, and poor in vegetable oils has many advantages, including higher HDL cholesterol, lower LDL cholesterol, and improved thyroid function.

Interested in sources supporting this.

This is what's so great about online nutrition journalism. Love butter? Great there's an article that backs up your beliefs. Hate butter? Even better, there's an article for that, too!

I've been having more than 100 gms of butter every day for the last 4 years. I'm on a ketogenic diet. I have to do it. Helps a lots with my sub-optimal health. Questions welcome.

What health conditions are you trying to treat with your diet?

I was originally trying to alleviate my sleep problems. After I switched my diet to a ketogenic (only meat, eggs and diary) not only did my sleep improve dramatically but a whole bunch of other things that I did not expect: mood, digestion, acidity(not sure about this), stamina, cold tolerance, fat redistribution in the body (reduced tummy flab, but less gaunt face.) etc.

Butter is good for you provided you don't fry with it. If overheated it supplies more than the usual amount of inflammatory compounds. Instead, fry with ghee (clarified butter) or tallow.

Is there any evidence that people frying with butter actually damage themselves?

I only use butter and duck fat. Nothing better than cooking with duck fat.

This is like comparing cigarettes to menthols.

Both are poisons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYTf0z_zVs0

I hypothesize that if a comparison contrasts a suitable quantity of buttering / fat for flavor and refined sugars for flavor (because who actually uses molasses/etc) then either hybrids or fat biased foods will be easier to process and regulate for most individuals.

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