Butter may not be bad for your heart

However, that doesn’t mean that butter provides any real health benefit, the researchers were quick to add.

A review of nine studies involving more than 600,000 people found that butter was only weakly associated with total mortality, and not linked to cardiovascular disease at all.

Scientists from Tufts University in Boston discovered eating one tablespoon of butter a day had little impact on overall mortality, no significant link with cardiovascular disease and strokes. But there was minor association with protection against diabetes. The researchers say that they will conduct another investigation to confirm their findings.

However, one nutritionist was not influenced to change his opinion on butter.

Dana White, who is a dietitian and professor of sports medicine at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., is not ready to jump on the butter bandwagon. This enormous analysis-a meta-study that included a total of 636,151 individuals across 15 countries, and involving 6.5 million person-years of follow-up-showed no association between the consumption of butter and cardiovascular disease.

Researchers standardized butter consumption across all nine studies to 14 grams per day, or roughly one tablespoon. One serving was equal to about one tablespoon of butter. But according to new research, we can probably all take that fear down a notch or two.

Senior author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian said that butter should not be considered an enemy in the food pyramid or in having good health. “As the researchers concede, ‘[Our] study does not prove cause-and-effect”. On the other hand, though, the same amount of butter was associated with a 4 percent lower risk of diabetes.

The low-fat-everything trend has become pretty ingrained in pop culture.

By looking at how butter is eaten, such as melted into pasta, spread onto toast, or eaten in slices of potato, future research efforts will be able to unravel the negative repercussions of the beloved saturated fat and identify healthier alternatives.

“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. The school’s eight degree programs – which focus on questions relating to nutrition and chronic diseases, molecular nutrition, agriculture and sustainability, food security, humanitarian assistance, public health nutrition, and food policy and economics – are renowned for the application of scientific research to national and worldwide policy. That’s because the combination of nutrients in a food, like butter, may have a different effect on people’s health than any single nutrient alone.

Tuft scientist Laura Pimpin said that butter should not receive so much flak as it is considered to be a “neutral” food, Science Daily noted.