Eating 14 g of butter a day won’t cause cardiovascular disease – in other words, it won’t clog your arteries – or coronary heart disease or a stroke, say researchers from Tufts University in Boston, US, who reviewed nine studies that had tracked 636,000 people.
Although there were 9,783 cases of cardiovascular disease in the groups, the link to eating butter was very weak, say the researchers. In fact, those who were eating butter every day had a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, the lifestyle disease that’s linked to diet.
The problem is in isolating individual macronutrients such as saturated fats, the researchers argue, when we need to start looking at overall diets. Current dietary advice, such as from the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee – which still promotes non-hydrogenated vegetable oils that are high in unsaturated fats over saturated fats – needs to be reviewed, they say. Other research has suggested that dairy products such as yogurt and cheese could reduce the risk of diabetes, for example.
(Source: PLoS One, 2016; http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158118)
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