Swap Out Your Regular Butter & Butter-Flavored Spreads
Replace them with: Grass-Fed Butter and Grass-Fed Ghee
Navigating this Blog Post:
The "Why"
We've been taught a lot of misleading information about fat - specifically, the supposed correlation between the consumption of saturated fat and the increased probability of heart disease. Most people, especially those with high cholesterol, are taught to stay away from foods high in saturated fat (i.e. butter) and aim for products that are low-fat and non-fat instead. Hopefully in January's Healthy Swap post, you learned a little more about how fat is not only healthy for you, but plays a fundamental part in building & maintaining the health of your cells, making the quality of the fats you eat (saturated fats included) extremely important.
In this post, I hope I can change your mind about those "heart healthy" butters and make grass-fed butter a new staple in your diet!
**If you'd like to read a little more on the benefit of saturated fat, here is a great article by Ben Greenfield and another one by Dr. Jockers.
Get rid of these products:
Butter (that isn't specifically grass-fed)
Butter made "spreadable" by being mixed with Canola Oil (or similar vegetable oils)
Butter Substitutes (usually artificially flavored & mostly vegetable oil; claiming to be "heart healthy")
Margarine that is vegetable oil based
Why They're Bad For You
The Short Answer:
For regular butter: the quality of the food that the cows eat, you eat. Which means not only are you consuming the (most-likely GMO) corn & soy that the cows ate, you're also consuming the hormones and antibiotics that the cows were pumped with. On top of that, grain-fed dairy is "more likely to contain mold and toxins from moldy grains used as feed." Unless it specifically states on your butter that it's from grass-fed cows, you can assume the butter is from cows fed on grains and similar products.
For spreadable butter: most are spreadable because of the addition of oil. However, the quality of the oil is usually not mentioned anywhere on the packaging, and based on what we now know about oils, the quality of them have a big effect on our health.
The Long Answer:
Cows are able to produce the highest quality milk ("more healthy fats and fat-soluble vitamins, a better omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, and fewer toxins") when they are able to eat grass, their natural diet, and when they're allowed to pasture, as opposed to living in a commercial feedlot. (This is why "organic" is not the same as grass-fed. Even if the grains the cows are being fed are organic, this is still not their natural diet of grass and will still affect the nutritional value of their milk, and therefore, their milk products.)
These commercial feedlots usually force the cows to live in incredibly cramped, disease-ridden and filthy living conditions. On top of that, cows that are fed on a diet of grains as opposed to grass grow "sick, malnourished and weak." Cows In these lots are therefore pumped with antibiotics (and sometimes growth hormones, as well) to fight infection and to be kept alive. Not the nutrient-dense, high-quality fat we've now learned your cells needs, am I right?
Going back to spreadable butter - one fact that bothers me about their packaging is that a lot of them are labeled as "heart healthy" because they claim to have 0% trans fat. However, if items contain less than 0.5g of trans fat per serving, the FDA made it legal for companies to label their products as 0% trans fat. So if you're slathering on more spreadable butter than the serving size (and let's face it, when do we ever abide by those serving sizes?), there's no accurate way to gauge how much trans fat you're intaking. And as we learned earlier on in this blog post, when it comes to different snacks, fried foods at restaurants, and cooking with unhealthy oils at home, trans fats can build up very fast.
Another thing that bothers me about their packaging, is that some spreadable butters (and brands of canola oil & vegetable oil) claim to be "heart healthy" because they're a good source of omega-3's. This isn't quite accurate. I won't go totally scientific on you, but basically when consuming foods, you want the fat ratio to be roughly 4:1 or less when it comes to omega-6's to omega-3's. Canola oil has a ratio of 2:1, so it seems healthy. However, your body has to do several fatty acid conversions once the fat is consumed before it's able to absorb those omega-3's, and there's research to suggest that your body can only do a small percentage of those conversions...which means though on paper the ratio is 2:1, your body is not able to actually absorb the full amount of omega-3's that are advertised.
Why These Replacements Are Good For You
Grass-Fed Butter: Butter has a pretty bad reputation in regards to saturated fat content. However, the list of health benefits for consuming butter specifically from grass-fed cows is pretty incredible - and hopefully enough to convince you to make it a part of your diet!
Rich in Omega-3's (crucial part of cell membrane structure, reduces inflammation & inflammation-linked diseases like arthritis, helps body burn fat, helps prevent heart disease & stroke by making hormones that regulate blood clotting & by aiding in contracting & relaxing of blood vessel walls)
6x more CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) than butter from grain-fed cows (fights cancer, helps build muscle instead of being stored as fat, prevents bone loss, and strong anti-inflammatory)
Great Source of Butyrate (increase energy levels, supports digestion & healthy gut bacteria, boosts metabolism. In mice, has been shown to lower blood sugar & cholesterol while improving fat burning and insulin sensitivity)
Great Source of Beta-Carotene (helps body produce Vitamin A, which supports your eye & bone health, immune system, and is also an antioxidant, which fights those free radicals we learned about)
Great Source of Saturated Fatty Acids - The Good Kind!!! (shown to protect against cardiovascular disease, and are essential for building healthy cells)
Grass-Fed Ghee: Pretty much all of the same info above - high in vitamins, antioxidants, and essential high-quality fatty acids - with the added bonus that it's clarified butter, which means a lot of the irritants that bother a human's gut & digestive system have been removed. Ghee does not need to be refrigerated, has a long shelf-life, can withstand higher heat temperatures than butter and has a subtle nuttier taste than regular butter (and stronger buttery-taste, in my opinion). Here are some great options for Grass-Fed Butter and Ghee:
For spreadable butters, Kerrygold sells this product that claims to be naturally soft, but if you're looking for butter that can be spread right from the fridge, needing no time to soften, they sell this product: Kerrygold Irish Butter with Olive Oil, that's made with high-quality olive oil, according to their website. Also, if you happen to live by a Sprouts grocery store, they sell their own brand of Irish grass-fed spreadable butter using olive oil.
Links to Cited Articles
Here are the articles that I used for research to write this blog post.
Health Benefits of Grass-Fed Butter - Bulletproof
7 Grass-Fed Butter Benefits - Mental Food Chain
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: An Essential Contribution - Harvard School of Public Health
Why I Started "Healthy Swaps" for 2022
I've always found when wanting to make a major health or lifestyle change, it's easier to take it in little steps than to try and make a massive change on the spot. Mastering little steps has always been more successful in making the change a lasting habit for me, as opposed to a temporary phase. I've had friends ask me about my diet & eating habits, and as soon as I tell them, they come back with different variations of "Oh that's too hard," "That's so much work," and "I could never do that!"
Believe me, when I started down this path to a healthier lifestyle, I felt the same way! When I have food or beauty/household products that I love, I never want to give them up. However, slowly but surely, I made little changes here & there and now, it's a lifestyle I'm happy to embrace. Sure, it's still very hard some days to make the healthier choice, even with the research I'm learning on why [insert food/product] is bad for you, but it's definitely not as hard as it used to be and I'm still striving to improve every day.
So this year I decided to create the Healthy Swaps series! Every month, I will post a new blog post with a simple swap to make, and with these small changes made every month, we can be living a healthier lifestyle by the end of the year!
***Full disclosure: this blog post contains affiliate links that may be commissionable.
Yes! And if you can afford it - raw milk grass fed grass finished butter. It’s like $15 for two sticks but - you can’t get any healthier!