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Butter isn’t good or bad for you, study finds

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STAR-ADVERTISER

Naked Cow Dairy Farm & Creamery owner and buttermaker Monique Zanderstroom made butter at the Waianae farm in Aug. 2015. A study authored by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston, has declared butter a “neutral” food.

Low-fat turkey meat, a bagel, cornflakes, margarine and soda are all worse for you than butter, according to a new study.

A study authored by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston, has declared butter a “neutral” food. It isn’t good for you, but it isn’t bad for you either.

There is no link between consuming butter and an increased risk of heart disease or stroke, the study says. It actually found that butter might slightly prevent Type 2 diabetes.

“Overall, our results suggest that butter should neither be demonized nor considered ‘back’ as a route to good health,” Mozaffarian said in a statement.

The findings “do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary guidelines on either increasing or decreasing butter consumption,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers analyzed nine eligible research studies representing 636,151 unique individuals with a total of 6.5 million person-years of follow-up.

The average butter consumption across the nine studies ranged from one-third of a tablespoon per day to 3.2 tablespoons per day. The study found small or insignificant differences in terms of total mortality, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

In four of the nine studies, people who ate butter daily had a 4 percent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. But those findings need to be further explored, Mozaffarian cautioned.

“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,” Mozaffarian said. “This could be real, or due to other factors linked to eating butter — our study does not prove cause-and-effect.”

12 responses to “Butter isn’t good or bad for you, study finds”

  1. wrightj says:

    If it isn’t good or bad, then just what is it?

  2. koloheboi says:

    Pass the butta, will ya!

  3. Publicbraddah says:

    Unless there’s concrete evidence, my motto is “everything in moderation”.

  4. cojef says:

    Please tell what I do not know? Not what was known by our parents ages ago when butter became a regular staple?

  5. Ntuitive says:

    Doc said I wasn’t eating healthy enough…..maybe now I’m eating too healthy for my own good?

    • oxtail01 says:

      You don’t need a doctor to tell you whether you’re healthy or not. Spinning dial on your scale will, as well as the inability to see your precious under the round mound.

  6. oxtail01 says:

    Butter is awesome, especially with garlic. Garlic butter fish or shrimp, garlic butter toast. Just had butter melted on Ewa grown sweet corn (AWESOME). Butter in itself isn’t going to kill you – it’s diet soda, too much hamburger, too much of anything that will. Unless you want to live a life of a pathetic vegan, enjoy!

  7. StifelHNL says:

    Marlon Brando loved the stuff

  8. On_My_Turf says:

    It is a lot better than margarine, shortening or vegetable oil. When those three products were proclaimed better for your health than natural animal fats. that is when diabetes, heart disease, and obesity became more than isolated occurrences. We were not ever intended to consume the oil chemically extracted and processed from plant seeds. Not saying nuts or seeds are bad, but the amount of oil from an ear of corn is not the same as corn oil in a bottle.

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