Butter: Healthy or harmful? What you need to know
Professor Rod Jackson: "Butter is the cream on top of milk. It has no protein or calcium, it's just the fat with a few vitamins you can get in other foods." Photo / Getty Images
From the archives: We’re back to leading the world in butter consumption – and that is bad news for our health, because it’s high in saturated fat and has poor nutritional content.In this 2017 feature from the New Zealand Listener archives, Nicky Pellegrino and Jennifer Bowden explore the effect of butter on New Zealander’s health.
By Nicky Pellegrino
Fat is good. Butter is back. Butter is “real food” with natural goodness. These are the types of messages being spread and this is worrying Rod Jackson. A professor of epidemiology at the University of Auckland, he has long been an outspoken opponent of the pro-fat lobby.
Jackson isn’t against all fats. He is a fan of the polyunsaturated and monounsaturated varieties. It’s saturated fats he is gunning for because of the overwhelming evidence that they’re bad for your heart. He says the pro-fat lobby often doesn’t mention this distinction, and what’s more, it isn’t talking about one of the good news stories of public health: we are living longer and are far less likely to die of a heart attack.
“Life expectancy in New Zealand is increasing by five hours a day,” says Jackson. “And there has been a 90% decrease in coronary heart disease mortality. When we first started watching this decline, we didn’t believe it. We looked at every possibility - that we’d changed diagnostic criteria, for instance. But there was no doubt it was going down in parallel with a decline in saturated-fat consumption.”
Our big butter-eating years were the early to mid-1960s, when we were getting through 20kg per person each year, says Jackson. “We were leaner than we are now, we ate less processed food, did more exercise and we were dropping dead from heart attacks and strokes at 10 times the rate we are now.”
People were advised to eat less saturated fat and they responded by turning to oils such as olive and canola. By the late 1960s, heart disease rates were starting to decline. Things changed in the 1980s, says Jackson. “The message was simplified to ‘eat less fat’, because cancer researchers had started to worry about fat as a cause of cancer.”
It had been reasonably easy for food manufacturers to respond to the “less-saturated fat” dictate by simply replacing unhealthy fats with healthier oils. But once they had to produce low-fat products, they looked for another replacement. Since salt already had a bad name, they chose sugar.
“That was a mistake,” says Jackson. “There is reasonable evidence to suggest that replacing fat with sugar led to increased weight.”
However, replacing fat with carbohydrates isn’t the best idea, either. Starchy carbs spike the blood sugar, but there is evidence they lower HDL cholesterol, widely known as the good cholesterol, Jackson says. And low HD levels are linked to a higher risk of heart disease as well as diabetes.