A team of medical researchers have some good news for those who cook with butter but consider it a guilty pleasure: It might actually be good for you. While the findings, published this week in the British Medical Journal, are not conclusive, they are compelling: researchers with the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine (UNC) analyzed a 50-year-old unpublished study out of Minnesota and found reason to believe that cooking with corn oil instead of butter may actually be worse for heart health. It’s an idea that, if one day proven, would upend the conventional nutrition wisdom of the last several decades.
In the last year, a growing number of voices within the nutrition community have been making the case that low-processed fatty foods aren’t as bad for you as once thought. It’s an argument that has shown up in studies from around the world and also in articles challenging national policy decisions based on the idea that fat should be avoided.
In the case of butter versus vegetable oil, the UNC team analyzed unpublished nutritional datagathered between 1968 and 1973 in a controlled study that included more than 9,400 men andwomen in one nursing home and six state mental hospitals in Minnesota.The subjects were broken into two groups. One was given a diet in which liquid corn oil was used in place of usual hospital cooking fats (including butter and hydrogenated oils) duringmeal preparation. The other group received meals cooked with common margarines andshortening. Roughly 57% of the 517 subjects that died during the course of the study underwent post-mortem examinations of their hearts, aortas, and brains. But no analysis of the data had been published until now. . .
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via There’s a growing body of evidence that butter is actually good for you — Quartz
The Most Revolutionary Act 
There should be a study with use of butter but with no hydrogenated oils.
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Absolutely, marblenecltr. However until a few years ago, it was impossible to get a such a study funded. The NIH funds very few of these studies, relying on the private foundations to fund them. The latter are totally dominated by the vegetable oil industry – Nina Teicholz writes about this in The Big Fat Surprise: https://stuartjeannebramhall.com/2015/02/12/why-the-low-fat-diet-makes-you-fat-and-gives-you-heart-disease-cancer-and-tooth-decay/
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Butter tastes so much better too.
Leslie
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Absolutely. It’s really disgusting to think that there was virtually no heart disease or cancer until hydrogenated oils (Crisco was the first) in 1913 – and then they lied to us for 50 years (based on falsified studies) to make us believe animal fats were the cause of this problem.
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I agree with you.
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Well, I certainly hope those ‘subjects’ were asked for their consent before being divided into test groups. But then again, I already know the answer to that!
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Fortunately a lot has changed since 1973. After the Senate reviewed the infamous Tuskagee syphilis experiments in the early 1970s, there was federal legislation passed requiring that all human research be approved by ethical review boards. The review board has to approve all elements of the experimental design including obtaining informed consent from subjects regarding potential risks.
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