Butter is not healthy, says nutritionist

WINNIPEG — There is no scientific debate about the health benefits of butter, says a University of Saskatchewan nutritionist.

Diet and nutrition experts have known for decades that eating too much butter and saturated fats can cause cardiovascular disease.

“There hasn’t been any back and forthing in the science. Next to none…. I can go back 30 years, I can tell you it’s been a consistent message: we should not be having a lot of solid fats in our diet,” said Melanie Rozwadowski, an assistant professor in the university’s College of Pharmacy and Nutrition.

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“Some of the strongest connections in all of nutrition (is) that a diet high in saturated fat is very highly linked to coronary heart disease. That has been known since the 1960s.”

The butter debate may be settled for nutritionists but not in the wild and wacky world of the internet.

There is a club of “butter-bros,” including U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are convinced that animal fats are healthy and seed oils are deadly.

Kennedy claims that seed oils are associated with a list of serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.

“Seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods, and the reason they’re in the foods is that they’re heavily subsidized,” he said in an October 2024 interview on Fox & Friends.

Kennedy’s campaign against seed oils is part of a larger movement of online influencers and C-List celebrities who firmly believe that seed oils are unhealthy and toxic.

A Harvard University study, published in early March, has concluded that Kennedy is out to lunch.

In a paper published in in JAMA Internal Medicine — a journal from the American Medical Association — researchers concluded that eating butter is much, much worse than consuming seed oils.

“After adjusting for potential confounders, the highest butter intake was associated with a 15 per cent higher risk of total mortality compared to the lowest intake,” says the paper.

“In contrast, the highest intake of total plant-based oils compared to the lowest intake was associated with a 16 per cent lower total mortality.… There was a statistically significant association between higher intakes of canola, soybean and olive oils and lower total mortality.”

The scientists behind the study wanted to compare consumption of butter to plant based alternatives such as soybean, canola, sunflower and olive oil.

They looked at large cohorts with thousands of people from three epidemiological studies: the Nurses’ Health Study, which began in 1990; the Nurses’ Health Study II, which started in 1991; and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study from 1999.

“Women and men who were free of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or neurodegenerative disease at baseline were included,” wrote lead researcher Yu Zhang from the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of epidemiology.

The main objective of the analysis was to count how many people died of cardiovascular disease or cancer and then try to connect that outcome to consumption of butter or plant-based oil.

Participants in the three studies filled out surveys every four years on how often they ate certain foods.

The crucial finding from those surveys? Eating more butter increases the likelihood of premature death by 15 per cent.

Reinforces years of research

This recent study on butter confirms what scientists and nutritionists have previously found – saturated fats are unhealthy.

“Things like butter, coconut oil and also palm oil … these are high in saturated fats,” said Rozwadowski, who has been a nutritionist since the early 1990s.

“This has been a consistent message. If anybody is trying to throw confusion into it, it’s only to make noise.”

Rozwadowski said switching out something like butter and replacing it with canola oil has proven health benefits.

“Many, many studies have demonstrated that if you replace butter and … these saturated fats with any seed oils, you immediately have a drop in total cholesterol.”

The Harvard research produced a clear result and it should be taken seriously, said Sarah Berry, a nutrition professor at King’s College in London, U.K., but it probably won’t.

“This research is very timely. Social media is currently awash with influencers promoting butter as a health food and claiming that seed oils are deadly,” Berry said on www.sciencemediacentre.org.

“In a sane world, this study would give the butter bros and anti-seed oil brigade pause for thought, but I’m confident that their brand of nutri-nonsense will continue unabated.”

Contact robert.arnason@producer.com