December 7, 2010

Butter is Better for Your Brain…and Now Your Heart

By Dave Asprey
Posted December 07 2010 | 11,101 views
By The Weston A. Price Foundation

Why Butter is Better

  • Vitamins …
    Butter is a rich source of easily absorbed vitamin A, needed for a wide range of functions, from maintaining good vision to keeping the endocrine system in top shape. Butter also contains all the other fat-soluble vitamins (D, E and K2), which are often lacking in the modern industrial diet.
  • Minerals …
    Butter is rich in important trace minerals, including manganese, chromium, zinc, copper and selenium (a powerful antioxidant). Butter provides more selenium per gram than wheat germ or herring. Butter is also an excellent source of iodine.

  • Fatty Acids …Butter provides appreciable amounts of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which support immune function, boost metabolism and have anti-microbial properties; that is, they fight against pathogenic microorganisms in the intestinal tract. Butter also provides the perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. Arachidonic acid in butter is important for brain function, skin health and prostaglandin balance.

  • Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) …
    When butter comes from cows eating green grass, it contains high levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a compound that gives excellent protection against cancer and also helps your body build muscle rather than store fat.

  • Glycospingolipids …
    These are a special category of fatty acids that protect against gastrointestinal infections, especially in the very young and the elderly. Children given reduced-fat milks have higher rates of diarrhea than those who drink whole milk.

  • Cholesterol …
    Despite all of the misinformation you may have heard, cholesterol is needed to maintain intestinal health and for brain and nervous system development in the young.

  • Wulzen Factor …
    A hormone-like substance that prevents arthritis and joint stiffness, ensuring that calcium in your body is put into your bones rather than your joints and other tissues. The Wulzen factor is present only in raw butter and cream; it is destroyed by pasteurization.
via articles.mercola.com

Dr. Mercola runs one of the most-trafficked health sites online because the information he presents is cutting edge and his library of information is huge.

He just posted an article from the Westin A. Price Foundation about the health benefits of butter with a headline saying butter slashes heart attack risk in half. I’m excited that his hundreds of thousands of subscribers will hear the news.

On The Bulletproof Executive, I’ve been posting tricks to get MORE butter into your body as a way to increase performance and particularly help with brain function and memory. Since I started eating about 2/3 of a normal sized stick of butter EVERY DAY for TWO YEARS, I’ve done nothing but get leaner and feel better, with less exercise, and my anti-aging blood profile that tracks risks improved to “better than theoretically possible for a male.

It’s a strange world where many of my senior executive friends order fat-free twigs for lunch but wonder why they’re dying without a cup of coffee or handful of candy 2 hours later, while at the same time they gasp as I add several tablespoons of healthy fat to whatever I’m eating.

The word is spreading, however, and more people are coming to realize that eating fat makes you satisfied and gives you energy. Another colleague who lost 60 lbs in the last 6 months, but has some more to go, did it by throwing away sugar and starch foods, and actually adding bacon or other fat to high protein foods like chicken breasts. He told me, “I stay full twice as long when I put a piece of bacon on my chicken. It’s amazing.”

He’s right, but it’s amazing that we as a society forgot this vital piece of nutrition information because of some bad research by Ancel Keys in 1953. Will it take another 50 years for us to fix that mistake?

So pass the butter…and the bacon. I need it so I can outperform at work today, then come home with enough energy to tire out my 3 year old and 1 year old!

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About Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley investor, computer security expert, and entrepreneur who spent 15 years and $250,000 to hack his own biology. He upgraded his brain by >20 IQ points, lowered his biological age, and lost 100 lbs without using calories or exercise. The Financial Times calls him a "bio-hacker who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation." His writing has been published by the New York Times and Fortune, and he's presented at Wharton, Kellogg, the University of California, and Singularity University. View all posts by Dave Asprey
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 7:24 am and tagged with , and posted in Brain Hacking, Bulletproof Body, Bulletproof Diet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
  • Kev

    Eliminating sugars and starches is great, but the saturated fat and extra cholesterol is not helpful:

    http://www.mprize.org/blogs/archives/2010/01/hi_dr_feinman_a.html

    What I think we’re seeing is exactly the divergence within these populations that you know: that carb is really rather bad for overweight, insulin-sensitive people, such that replacing it even with SFA is relatively harmless — whereas for lean, insulin-sensitive people, SFA (and dietary cholesterol, its fellow-traveller in omnivorous diets) is likely more *relatively* harmful, because carb is less able to derange the metabolism. We have to remember that any time we look at these studies and see only modest or borderline-significant effects: 66% of the US population is overweight, and half of that majority is obeese; Europe is somewhat better-off, at 49.8% and 13.3% in men and 36.0 & 13.5% in women per MONICA. So the deleterious effects of any nutrient with a differential effect on low-BMI, insulin-sensitive people will tend to be blunted by the much larger number of people for whom such effects are blunted by their “larger” problem.

    It also means that the deleterious effects of a rise in SFA intake are at least temporarily outweighed if it is is part of a dietary shift into a lower-carb diet when it is successfully used for weight loss (as opposed to just being a person’s self-selected default diet, which of course is what’s going on in teh studies in Jakobsen and in the Swedish, Greek, and US Nurses low-carb/high-protein studies). But it’s reasonably clear that if you’re insulin-sensitive — which, interestingly, is what one is likely to become after losing weight on a successful low-carb weight-loss diet! — the effects of SFA become more *relatively* harmful as teh deleterious effects of carb recede.

    I’ll stick with unsaturated fats in my diet.

    • Dave Asprey

      Kev, I’d love to see your blood lipids.

      The link you referenced suffered from major shortcomings:
      1) It did not differentiate between the various saturated fats. (ie MCT is different from LCT)
      2) It ignored whether the oils were oxidized or not.
      3) It did not discuss the mycotoxin content of the animal fats, which is of far more influence on heart disease than cholesterol.
      4) It referenced stuff like the Nurse’s Study, which relied on self-reported intake, which is notoriously unreliable.

      For a longer, more scientifically referenced read, I’d recommend Mary Enig’s book “Know Your Fats” or either of Gary Taubes’ books.

      A diet high in PUFA will lead to cancer, among other bad things. You can have my oxidized omega-6 oils if I can have your grass-fed butter. :)

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  • http://rmctech.net Ryan Critchett

    Really interesting stuff, Dave. I, like you, am fascinated by self optimization and theorize about a lot of things related to cognitive performance. I just realized, over the course of the last few days, that my cognitive performance has been strikingly better. The only differences in my diet (and lifestyle) are a couple slices of butter per day, and a serving of broccoli. While the broccoli certainly has neurological benefits, the fatty acids in the butter (among other things) are in my mind, absolutely contributing to this more alert, more conscious feeling. I don’t want to overdo it though! I’ll be researching this more, to find a minimum effective dose, that doesn’t in any way jeopardize my health, both today and tomorrow.

  • Sean

    “Wulzen Factor …
    A hormone-like substance that prevents arthritis and joint stiffness, ensuring that calcium in your body is put into your bones rather than your joints and other tissues. The Wulzen factor is present only in raw butter and cream; it is destroyed by pasteurization. ”

    As a grass, apparently Stigmasterol (Wulzen Factor) is also in Raw Sugar Cane… In concentrations orders-of-magnitude higher than butter. I guess cows obtain stigmasterol from other grasses.

    Searching the net for ‘Wulzen factor sugar cane’ yields some vague but interesting results.

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