Should we eat butter and tallow?

They may be real food, but are they healthy? That was the question posed in a recent newspaper article.

It was an Australian paper, and the article was written in the wake of the new US dietary guidelines which give butter and tallow a green light.

The journalist quoted four dietitians, and the message was that no, butter and tallow aren’t healthy.

One said a little bit of butter is OK, but it doesn’t make nutritional sense to promote it.

That will be a common response, because as we all know, the saturated fat in both of these causes heart disease.

There’s plenty of research demonstrating the folly of this pearl of wisdom, but despite that, it’s embedded in a lot of thinking.

The journalist could have sought comment from a broad range of medical specialists and researchers who’d have refuted the idea that saturated fat is harmful, but the only person she referred to who wasn’t a dietitian was a ‘social media personality’ who’s apparently keen on tallow.

By the way, I have no idea why tallow is getting a moment in the spotlight, and not, say, lard, but tallow also seems to have become a skincare product. (Mind you, I’ve noticed the prices of organic tallow, and maybe Estée Lauder has shares in it.)

Clearly, none us needs to eat either butter or tallow. One of the dietitians quoted in the article said: ‘I recommend using plant-based oils such as olive oil, avocado and macadamia oil as they will also provide other important phytonutrients including antioxidants.’

I suppose this isn’t the time to mention that cholesterol is also an antioxidant, but absolutely, those are all suitable oils.

If we wanted to make a case for butter and tallow, we could say that they’re both anti-microbial, good for our immune systems, and contain vitamins A,D,E, and K. Plus tallow has a high heat point.

I don’t mean this flippantly, but perhaps the texture of things like tallow can work against them. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think of hard fats clogging arteries (although they don’t).

As you might be aware, saturated fat was first targeted in the 1950s by a prominent scientist called Ancel Keys.

After he established that cholesterol in the diet doesn’t raise levels of blood cholesterol — something we later lost sight of — he assumed that dietary fat must raise blood cholesterol, which in turn caused heart disease.

He set out to prove it, but couldn’t, then came up with a new idea — that the problem must be one type of fat, saturated fat.

Keys is known for cherry-picking his data to try to make his case, and while other researchers at the time pointed out the flaws in his work, by sheer force of personality his viewpoint prevailed.

Heart disease data collected in the 1950s, shortly after the end of World War Two, likely reflected both the stress of war and the impact of smoking rather than the effect of saturated fat.

In Australia, heart disease hit its highest point in 1968, the same year as smoking rates peaked. By the early 70s we had health warnings on cigarette packets and TV and radio ads for cigarettes were being phased out.

By then we’d also made strides in the provision of coronary care units in hospitals, which would have improved statistics on cardiovascular deaths.

Still, the idea that saturated fat was the source of heart disease was firmly entrenched. Butter was replaced with margarine and tallow with vegetable oils.

At the same time, the Seventh Day Adventist Church’s campaign against animal foods was in full swing, and both this and Keys’ legacy were and still are defining elements in the education and training of dietitians.

Since then, numerous studies have lumped together foods that naturally contain saturated fat such as meat, eggs and dairy with artificially hardened (partially hydrogenated) fats such as shortening and declared them all the same. They’re not.

One of the links in the newspaper article was to a study published last year. As the journalist told us, it used data gathered over 33 years to show that ‘substituting butter with plant-based oils may confer substantial benefits for preventing premature deaths’.

Sounds compelling. Except that this was a shoddy piece of work.

It came from the same department at Harvard that produces many, many studies that all reach the same conclusion — that plant-based foods are healthy and animal foods are unhealthy.

The databases they use were developed between 1990 and 2023. Every four years people were sent a questionnaire to complete which included questions about what they ate and how much of it. This information was then married up with statistics on who’d died.

Unfortunately, humans are humans and this kind of data is never accurate.

The study had many other shortcomings, but I’ll try to keep it brief.

For one thing, ‘butter’ actually meant ‘butter from butter and margarine blend’. The headlines at the time didn’t mention that and nor did this journalist. So we’re not even talking about butter.

Second, most people in the study didn’t eat that much of it. The big butter/margarine consumers (only 1-2% of participants) averaged about 2-3 teaspoons a day. These were the folk who apparently died prematurely.

Yet those who ate 1-2 teaspoons a day had no issues. They’re asking us to believe that the difference between premature death and survival was (drumroll…) one teaspoon.

In addition, compared to those who ate the least amount of butter/margarine, the big consumers also drank more alcohol, exercised less, smoked more, had a higher BMI, and took fewer vitamins. Regardless of whether supplements are beneficial, it’s health-conscious people who take them.

This tells us that the biggest butter/margarine eaters were less healthy and/or interested in their health in a raft of ways, and trying to pin the difference on ‘butter’ is interesting.

So as well as the unreliability of food questionnaire data, we have the silliness of comparing a tiny few with everyone else, the dubious definition of butter, and results contaminated by other lifestyle factors such as exercise and smoking. There’s more, but that’s enough to get the idea.

The journalist might believe this provided proof that a teaspoon of butter/margarine substantially increases our risk of premature death, and that oils such as canola or soybean will decrease it, but the rest of us should be highly sceptical.

There was also criticism that butter and tallow are just part of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s personal agenda.

His Food and Drug Commissioner, gastroenterologist Dr Marty Makary is also a strong advocate for ‘real, nutrient-dense food while reducing ultra-processed, high-sugar, and refined carbohydrate intake’.

Kennedy’s vaccine policies have, unsurprisingly, drawn plenty of criticism and it would be easy, as this article did, to dismiss the new guidelines as being about him. Or the Trump administration generally.

But that kind of dismissal fails to recognise the calibre of the scientists who provided Kennedy’s department with reports on topics such as protein, fats, carbohydrates, and pediatric nutrition in the lead-up to the development of the guidelines. The ones I know of are well respected, and you can find their work in the Scientific Foundations material attached as an appendix to the document.

These processes will never be free of politics and conflicts of interest, regardless of who’s in power.  Still, it would be gratifying if this new approach could begin to make a dent in the soaring levels of obesity, diabetes, and so on (though, as some have pointed out, if this happens, Ozempic will get the credit, which is probably true).

There’s been a bias against saturated fats for decades, because incorrect assumptions were taken as gospel. This could be an opportunity for protagonists on both sides of the fence to take a deep breath and go back and examine the research from start to finish with an open mind.

Yes, that’s hilarious, and never going to happen. The agendas run way too deep.

But if you want to eat butter and/or tallow, there’s not a skerrick of real evidence that they’re unhealthy.

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