A little butter isn't going to kill anyone, but
it's not a health food, either, nutrition experts found in a big study
released Wednesday.
Before you sigh and complain about science
flip-flopping, the researchers want to point out that they took a new
approach to answering the classic question about healthy food. They
looked at actual foods that people ate, rather than the ingredients that
make up those foods, like saturated fats.
Butter ... not a killer.
Their upshot? There are better things to worry about than butter.
"I would say butter is neither good nor bad,"
said Laura Pimpin of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science &
Policy at Tufts University, who led the study.
"If you can replace it with the more healthful plant-based oils, do so."
So many studies look at saturated fat or
unsaturated fat or omega-3 fatty acids or calcium. Pimpin's team set out
to find studies that looked at whole foods that people actually eat and
then calculated their risks for overall death, heart disease and
diabetes.
"We did the most up-to-date review that we
could," Pimpin told NBC News. "We only found nine studies looking at the
effect of butter. That's a finding in itself."
But they did their best and found no clear
evidence that butter does any harm or good by itself. People who ate the
most butter were slightly more likely to die during the various study
periods than were people who ate little or none, but the risk was very
slight, the team reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS
ONE.
"We found a very small protective effect of
butter intake on type-2 diabetes — not enough to tell people to eat it,
but enough to say this might not be of huge concern for policymakers to
be concerned with," Pimpin said.
The team wrote: "Our findings suggest a major
focus on eating more or less butter, by itself, may not be linked to
large differences in mortality, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes. In
sum, our findings do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary
guidelines on butter consumption."
What might be more useful to focus on is the stuff people eat butter with, Pimpin said.
"It may be the case that the bagel you spread
your butter on or the bread you spread it on may be more of a concern
than the butter itself," she said.
"It's common sense. We do know that there are
other foods that are healthful. If you can switch to cooking with olive
oil, that could be beneficial," she said.
