Why Butter Is Better

by Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD

When the fabricated food folks and apologists for the corporate farm realized that they couldn’t block America’s growing interest in diet and nutrition, a movement that would ultimately put an end to America’s biggest and most monopolistic industries, they infiltrated the movement and put a few sinister twists on information going out to the public. Item number one in the disinformation campaign was the assertion that naturally saturated fats from animal sources are the root cause of the current heart disease and cancer plague. Butter bore the brunt of the attack, and was accused of terrible crimes. The Diet Dictocrats told us that it was better to switch to polyunsaturated margarine and most Americans did. Butter all but disappeared from our tables, shunned as a miscreant.

This would come as a surprise to many people around the globe who have valued butter for its life-sustaining properties for millennia. When Dr. Weston Price studied native diets in the 1930’s he found that butter was a staple in the diets of many supremely healthy peoples.  Isolated Swiss villagers placed a bowl of butter on their church altars, set a wick in it, and let it burn throughout the year as a sign of divinity in the butter. Arab groups also put a high value on butter, especially deep yellow-orange butter from livestock feeding on green grass in the spring and fall. American folk wisdom recognized that children raised on butter were robust and sturdy; but that children given skim milk during their growing years were pale and thin, with "pinched" faces.

Does butter cause disease? On the contrary, butter protects us against many diseases.

Butter & Heart Disease

Heart disease was rare in America at the turn of the century. Between 1920 and 1960, the incidence of heart disease rose precipitously to become America’s number one killer. During the same period butter consumption plummeted from eighteen pounds per person per year to four. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in statistics to conclude that butter is not a cause. Actually butter contains many nutrients that protect us from heart disease. First among these is vitamin A which is needed for the health of the thyroid and adrenal glands, both of which play a role in maintaining the proper functioning of the heart and cardiovascular system. Abnormalities of the heart and larger blood vessels occur in babies born to vitamin A deficient mothers. Butter is America’s best and most easily absorbed source of vitamin A.

Butter contains lecithin, a substance that assists in the proper assimilation and metabolism of cholesterol and other fat constituents.

Butter also contains a number of anti-oxidants that protect against the kind of free radical damage that weakens the arteries. Vitamin A and vitamin E found in butter both play a strong anti-oxidant role. Butter is a very rich source of selenium, a vital anti-oxidant–containing more per gram than herring or wheat germ.

Butter is also a good dietary source cholesterol. What?? Cholesterol an anti-oxidant?? Yes indeed, cholesterol is a potent anti-oxidant that is flooded into the blood when we take in too many harmful free-radicals–usually from damaged and rancid fats in margarine and highly processed vegetable oils. A Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using margarine.

Butter & Cancer

In the 1940’s research indicated that increased fat intake caused cancer. The abandonment of butter accelerated; margarine–formerly a poor man’s food– was accepted by the well-to-do. But there was a small problem with the way this research was presented to the public. The popular press neglected to stress that fact that the "saturated" fats used in these experiments were not naturally saturated fats but partially hydrogenated or hardened fats–the kind found mostly in margarine but not in butter. Researchers stated–they may have even believed it–that there was no difference between naturally saturated fats in butter and artificially hardened fats in margarine and shortening. So butter was tarred with the black brush of the fabricated fats, and in such a way that the villains got passed off as heroes.

Actually many of the saturated fats in butter have strong anti-cancer properties. Butter is rich in short and medium chain fatty acid chains that have strong anti-tumor effects. Butter also contains conjugated linoleic acid which gives excellent protection against cancer.

Vitamin A and the anti-oxidants in butter–vitamin E, selenium and cholesterol–protect against cancer as well as heart disease.

Butter & the Immune System

Vitamin A found in butter is essential to a healthy immune system; short and medium chain fatty acids also have immune system strengthening properties. But hydrogenated fats and an excess of long chain fatty acids found in polyunsaturated oils and many butter substitutes both have a deleterious effect on the immune system.

Butter & Arthritis

The Wulzen or "anti-stiffness" factor is a nutrient unique to butter. Dutch researcher Wulzen found that it protects against calcification of the joints–degenerative arthritis–as well as hardening of the arteries, cataracts and calcification of the pineal gland. Unfortunately this vital substance is destroyed during pasteurization. Calves fed pasteurized milk or skim milk develop joint stiffness and do not thrive. Their symptoms are reversed when raw butterfat is added to the diet.

Butter & Osteoporosis

Vitamins A and D in butter are essential to the proper absorption of calcium and hence necessary for strong bones and teeth. The plague of osteoporosis in milk-drinking western nations may be due to the fact that most people choose skim milk over whole, thinking it is good for them. Butter also has anti-carcigenic effects, that is, it protects against tooth decay.

Butter & the Thyroid Gland

Butter is a good source of iodine, in highly absorbable form. Butter consumption prevents goiter in mountainous areas where seafood is not available. In addition, vitamin A in butter is essential for proper functioning of the thyroid gland.

Butter & Gastrointestinal Health

Butterfat contains glycospingolipids, a special category of fatty acids that protect against gastro-intestinal infection, especially in the very young and the elderly. For this reason, children who drink skim milk have diarrhea at rates three to five times greater than children who drink whole milk. Cholesterol in butterfat promotes health of the intestinal wall and protects against cancer of the colon. Short and medium chain fatty acids protect against pathogens and have strong anti-fungal effects. Butter thus has an important role to play in the treatment of candida overgrowth.

Butter & Weight Gain

The notion that butter causes weight gain is a sad misconception. The short and medium chain fatty acids in butter are not stored in the adipose tissue, but are used for quick energy. Fat tissue in humans is composed mainly of longer chain fatty acids. These come from olive oil and polyunsaturated oils as well as from refined carbohydrates. Because butter is rich in nutrients, it confers a feeling of satisfaction when consumed. Can it be that consumption of margarine and other butter substitutes results in cravings and bingeing because these highly fabricated products don’t give the body what it needs?.

Butter for Growth & Development

Many factors in butter ensure optimal growth of children. Chief among them is vitamin A. Individuals who have been deprived of sufficient vitamin A during gestation tend to have narrow faces and skeletal structure, small palates and crowded teeth.  Extreme vitamin A deprivation results in blindness, skeletal problems and other birth defects.  Individuals receiving optimal vitamin A from the time of conception have broad handsome faces, strong straight teeth, and excellent bone structure. Vitamin A also plays an important role in the development of the sex characteristics. Calves fed butter substitutes sicken and die before reaching maturity.

The X factor, discovered by Dr. Weston Price (and now believed to be vitamin K₂), is also essential for optimum growth. It is only present in butterfat from cows on green pasture.  Cholesterol found in butterfat plays an important role in the development of the brain and nervous system. Mother’s milk is high in cholesterol and contains over 50 percent of its calories as butterfat. Low fat diets have been linked to failure to thrive in children –yet low-fat diets are often recommended for youngsters! Children need the many factors in butter and other animal fats for optimal development.

Beyond Margarine

It’s no longer a secret that the margarine Americans have been spreading on their toast, and the hydrogenated fats they eat in commercial baked goods like cookies and crackers, is the chief culprit in our current plague of cancer and heart disease. But mainline nutrition writers continue to denigrate butter–recommending new fangled tub spreads instead. These may not contain hydrogenated fats but they are composed of highly processed rancid vegetable oils, soy protein isolate and a host of additives. A glitzy cookbook called Butter Busters promotes butter buds, made from maltodextrin, a carbohydrate derived from corn, along with dozens of other highly processed so-called low-fat commercial products.

Who benefits from the propaganda blitz against butter? The list is a long one and includes orthodox medicine, hospitals, the drug companies and food processors. But the chief beneficiary is the large corporate farm and the cartels that buy their products–chiefly cotton, corn and soy–America’s three main crops, which are usually grown as monocultures on large farms, requiring extensive use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. All three–soy, cotton and corn–can be used to make both margarine and the new designer spreads. In order to make these products acceptable to the up-scale consumer, food processors and agribusiness see to it that they are promoted as health foods. We are fools to believe them.

The best butter you can eat is raw, organic butter because pasteurization destroys nutrients.

Butter, Vitamin D and the X-Factor of Dr Price : by Royal Lee

Dr. Royal Lee – scientist, inventor and nutrition researcher – is probably best known as the founder of Standard Process Laboratories, which specializes in the formulation of natural vitamins derived from food sources. This article, from the Lee Foundation for nutritional Research, comes from the collection of Joseph Connolly, late husband of Patricia Connolly and one of the founders of the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

The special nutritional factors present in butter as known up to 1942 are without question. It was shown that butter has the following characteristics of superiority over other fats and oleomargarine imitations:

The nation’s best source of vitamin A

Unit for unit, the vitamin A in butter was three times as effective as the vitamin A in fish liver oils. The natural vitamin D in butter was found 100 times as effective as the common commercial form of D (viosterol). Butter, prescribed by physicians as a remedy for tuberculosis, psoriasis, xerophthalmia, dental caries, and in preventing rickets, has been promptly effective.

Butter carries vitamin E in sufficient quantity to prevent deficiency reactions. Since that time, new and important evidence has accumulated which indicates other nutritional functions supplied by butter. This evidence appears to revolve around the physiological ramifications of the effects of the vitamin E complex. Up to the present, vitamin E has been considered a tocopherol, and its function analyzed as nothing more than a physiological anti-oxidant.

It now appears evident that the real vitamin E is that factor in the E complex that is being protected from oxidation by the tocopherol group, and that the same mistake has been made in attributing E activity to tocopherols as in the case of the promotion of pure viosterol as vitamin D, ascorbic acid as vitamin C, niacin as the anti-pellagra vitamin, pyridoxine as B6, or folic acid as the anti-pernicious anemia fraction of liver. In each case the isolation of one factor as the “vitamin” in question has embarrassed the discoverer, in his assumption that he had discovered the “pot of gold” at the rainbow’s end, by the attribution of vitamin activity to some synthetic or pure crystalline component of a natural complex. No reasonable student of nutrition can today deny the axiom that all vitamins are complexes and cannot exert their normal physiological effect other than as the complete complex, as found in natural foods.

The true vitamin E is found in the chromatin material of the germinal tissues of plant and animal, and in young plants that are in a state of rapid growth. It seems to be a phospholipid carrying a special fatty acid in combination that has heretofore traveled under the cognomen of vitamin F. (Vitamin F was first discovered as a part of the wheat germ oil vitamin complex; at least the term vitamin F was first used to designate the essential fatty acid fraction.)

The fact that an unsaturated fatty acid as vitamin F is a part of the E complex, probably in molecular combination, explains the close relationship between the two vitamins in their synergistic support of cell division in reproduction, in maintenance of epithelium (where cell division is also predominant), and in kidney and liver metabolism, both epithelial activities. It explains the fact that both are factors in calcium metabolism, vitamin E deficiency resulting in bone resorption8 just as vitamin F deficiency results in less calcium available to bone.

Tocopherol administration in excess also results in bone-calcium loss, just as is caused by a deficiency of vitamin E. So again we have more evidence that tocopherol is NOT the vitamin E, but rather a protector that can in excess reduce the availability of traces of the real vitamin. Now, just what IS the real function of the real vitamin E complex?

…A factor in young grass is apparently the same one as described by Dr. Weston A. Price, in the second edition of his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which he called “Activator X” and was found only in butter from cows fed spring grass. “Activator X” seemed very susceptible to oxidation, being lost in the butter within a few months after its production. “Activator X” was shown to promote calcification and health of bones and teeth in human patients. It inhibited the growth of the caries bacillus (facto-bacillus acidophilus) completely, one test showing 680,000 salivary bacterial count before the use of “Activator X” and none after.

[Research shows] that this grass factor SUPPORTS THE DIFFERENTIATION OF SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT. Animals not getting the grass factor (but getting TOCOPHEROL) required 23% MORE time to become sexually mature.

It is highly interesting to find that tests of oleomargarine feeding to human subjects in comparison with commercial butter (having relatively low content of the fragile “X’ factor), HAD THE SAME EFFECT of failing to bring out the secondary sex characteristics: not only a delay, but a failure to promote sex changes in toto. Here are the results for children with ages up to 17 years:

160 Children were fed oleo, 107 butter, over a period of two years.

Average gain in weight on oleo for girls, 8.2 pounds. Yearly average growth in height, 2.2 inches. Girls on butter gained 6.3 pounds per year, grew 0.9 of an inch. Boys on oleo grew 2.2 inches per year, gained 8.1 pounds. On butter, boys gained 6.7 pounds, grew 1.6 inches.

A characteristic effect of castration of the child is a stimulation of growth and greater height. The investigators say the results vindicated oleo. What do YOU say?

… We all are what we are – men, women, white, black or yellow – simply because our growth and development is guided every minute by certain chemical factors in our cells, reproduced exactly in the chromosome, the real blueprints of our bodies. These factors – determinants to the geneticist – are protected by wrappings or insulating layers of a fatty nature that prevent the enzymatic digestion or damage, otherwise inevitable, to which these factors are exposed. It is well known that chromosomes are destroyed and liquefied in vitamin E complex deficiency.

These determinants even seem to be secreted into the mouth in the saliva (that probably is how it happens that salivary gland cells have extraordinarily large chromosomes) to start the alteration of food factors into tissue as quickly as possible. It is quite analogous to the attachment to a lot of incoming steel as it enters a factory, of the blueprints that direct how it is to be processed to become the finished product….

It is obvious that any interference by vitamin or other deficiency with the determinant cycle will delay or impair the normal plan of development.

Do you wonder that your instincts demand butter over oleo?

Do you wonder that since yellow butter contains more “Activator X” than pale butter, people prefer the yellow kind that comes from spring grass feeding to the cow?

It is very interesting to note how nutritional experts and “scientists” have always been found to exstole oleomargarine as equal to butter as a food. As far back as 1886, when oleo was first made, before vitamins were thought of, scientists testified that oleo was equal to butter in food value. They are still testifying, without knowing what new factors might still be found in butter which cause people to prefer it to oleo (over any period of time) even after milk and butter flavors have been added to oleo to create the best possible imitation of real butter.

Animal tests have shown oleo to better advantage than such human feeding tests as reported by Drs. Leichenger, Eisenberg and Carlson. This is, no doubt, because milk proteins have always been used in any test diet along with oleo. Milk proteins carry the trace factors peculiar to milk that oleo lacks, and these cushion the deficiency reactions. The tests are about as honest scientifically as those on aluminum salts in baking powder, where the animals given the toxic aluminum salts were also fed an antidote “sodium silicate’’ under the guise of “mineral supplement.” Dr. H. J. Deuel, testifying before the House Committee on Agriculture in connection with hearings on oleomargarine in 1948, was quizzed on this point.

Oleo has other drawbacks. It is a synthetic product, being hydrogenated vegetable fat. The hydrogenation destroys all associated vitamins or phospholipids. As it comes from the hydrogenator, it is admittedly unfit for food, has a vile odor and must be “refined.” The oleo, after the bad odors have been removed, and after flavoring with milk products to imitate butter, must then be preserved with a poisonous chemical, sodium benzoate, to keep it from again developing a bad flavor.

The use of sodium benzoate as a preservative in oleomargarine is brought to light in testimony before the official hearings on the oleomargarine tax repeal. … Note should be made that natural foodstuffs, such as butter, contain naturally occurring anti-oxidants such as the protector of vitamin E, alpha tocopherol. Presence of this anti-oxidant in butter makes it unnecessary to add synthetic and poisonous preservatives such as sodium benzoate. Oleo, however, being a synthetic product, is lacking in these natural preservatives; hence the necessity for the addition of the chemicals. No doubt the addition of vitamin E to oleo would preserve the product far better than the sodium benzoate. Vitamin E, however, is far more expensive than sodium benzoate, which explains the use of the latter instead.

Such poisonous preservatives are not commonly permitted in foods, but the flour industry and the oleo industry seem to be specially favored. It is well known that Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the first head of the Food and Drug Administration, lost his job in 1912 because he refused to be “reached” by food manufacturers like the oleo people, who could not exist without special permission to violate the law. When he told the entire sordid story of the unspeakable corruption and malignant chicanery that exists in the food and drug operations in Washington in his book,The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law, and published it at his own expense in 1930, little attention was paid to the matter by the newspapers. Since his death a year later, the books have been eliminated from circulation, and his still-surviving widow, by her ownership of the copyright, is “sitting on the lid” by refusing to permit reproduction or quotation of any part of the book.
The penalties for using a synthetic, imitation, chemically-embalmed substitute for butter seem to be quite drastic. Some appear to be: