Benefits Of Eating Butter

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Butter Is Back—and More Appreciated Than Ever

In December 2025, in the lead-up to the holiday cooking season, the International Dairy Foods Association issued a press release—titled “You Butter Believe It”—that enthusiastically drew attention to rising butter consumption in the U.S.¹ Citing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the press release cel­ebrated the almost seven pounds of per-capita butter consumed in 2024 as a “historic high” for the fifty-year period during which USDA has been tracking dairy trends.

After decades of butter demonization, seven pounds per person per year may sound like an “all-time high”² to some (in 2000, after all, annual per-capita butter consumption was just four pounds), but historical accounts that reach farther back than the mid-1970s reveal that butter consumption was once considerably higher. In the early 1900s, Americans reportedly consumed the equivalent of “about a stick and a half per person per day.”³

Sadly, the early twentieth century marked a turning point for butter consumption that turned out to be hugely detrimental to Ameri­cans’ health, while also interfering with their enjoyment of food. Helped along by Crisco’s aggressive marketing of its toxic cottonseed oil product,⁴ supply shortages and rationing during the two World Wars and increasingly nefarious dietary guidelines, per capita availability of butter (with “availability” being a proxy mea­sure for consumption) decreased by 68 percent (from 17.9 to 5.7 pounds per year) from 1909 to 2017, with similar declines in availability of other saturated animal fats like lard and tallow.⁵ Meanwhile, margarine and seed oil availability increased by 192 percent and 329 percent, re­spectively. The surprisingly honest researchers who in 2022 documented those “down” and “up” trends admit that the burgeoning of chronic disease over the last century has no association with saturated fat intake.⁵ For our modern food-related ills, their study is yet another piece of evidence that we should be condemning what Dr. Weston A. Price called the “displacing foods of modern commerce”—not butter.

A FORTUITOUS DISCOVERY

Historians estimate that humans have been making butter for at least six thousand and per­haps as long as ten thousand years. According to the colorful legend that constitutes butter’s origin story, the discovery of butter was a “lucky accident.”⁶ The hypothesis is that nomadic tribes kept milk (for example, from yaks, sheep, goats or camels) in animal bladders attached to their pack animals, and as they journeyed, the sacks would bounce around, causing the milk to churn itself into butter.⁷ NPR describes this apocryphal gastronomic-history-making mo­ment as follows:

“Thirsty from a long, hot journey, [a] weary herdsman reached for the sheepskin bag of milk knotted to the back of his pack animal. But as he tilted his head to pour the warm liquid into his mouth, he was astonished to find that the sheep’s milk had curdled. The rough terrain and constant joggling of the milk had transformed it into butter—and bewilderingly, it tasted heavenly.”⁸

From there, as author Jennifer McLagan recounts in the fifty-four pages of comments and recipes she devotes to butter in her cookbook titled Fat,⁶ humans were quick t o figure out strategies to “prolong butter’s life” and—long before the advent of modern refrigeration—keep it from going rancid. Preservation methods in­cluded heating it and removing the milk solids to make ghee (a particularly handy and nutritious technique in hot climates such as India’s) or salting it—salt is, after all, “the world’s oldest preservative” and made it possible to have butter in the winter months.⁹ Nowadays, high-end cooks often shun salted butter, claiming that it is “the cause of many failed recipes” and prefer­ring to retain control over the amount of salt in their baking or cooking.¹⁰

In Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia, an­other preservation technique was to bury butter in cool-temperature, low-oxygen peat bogs. Ac­cording to some historians and archaeologists, the peat bogs may also have been handy for hiding butter from fat-starved thieves!¹¹ Over time, however, “bog butter” apparently acquired a “rancid, cheesy aroma” and “waxy texture” that may have lessened its palatability.¹¹

Considering the price of butter today, it is somewhat astonishing to learn that among the northern Europeans of yore, the upper classes initially dismissed butter as a “peasant food.”⁶ In a cookbook from 1450, McLagan points out, lard was the preferred fat and only 2 percent of recipes called for butter. However, no one with taste buds can ignore the wonders of butter for long. By the sixteenth century, butter was show­ing up in about a third of cookbook recipes, and by the nineteenth century, “it had become the basic building block of classic French cuisine.”⁶

As butter gradually “ceased being a peasant food and was commandeered by the rich,”⁶ the very wealthy even started purchasing indul­gences from the Catholic Church to continue eating it during Lent.³ The Rouen cathedral’s “Butter Tower” (Tour de Beurre), constructed between 1488 and 1506, is said to owe its name to this “unique medieval fundraising strategy.”¹² Georges d’Amboise—a French cardinal, arch­bishop and statesman under King Louis XII— was a significant proponent of the cathedral, and as such, “obtained a papal dispensation allowing donors to the tower’s construction to consume butter during Lent.”¹² (A modern Orthodox priest striving to bring people back to the true meaning of Lent satirically asks, “If I can’t have butter, can I have ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not But­ter’? Where’s the Lenten sacrifice in substitut­ing one thing for something else that tastes just like it? Like non-dairy coffee creamer, which is worse for you healthwise than real cream.”¹³)

SACRED AND VALUED

In interviews about her book, Butter: A Rich History,14 author Elaine Khosrova has commented that, for ancient civilizations, “the unexplained mystery behind milk’s transforma­tion into butter made it seem magical.”⁸ This likely explains butter’s long-ago use as a sacred offering to the gods by civilizations such as the ancient Sumerians.¹⁵ (Some bloggers suggest that butter offerings to the gods have contin­ued into modern times!¹⁶) Butter appears in the Bible, too, with the compelling verse in Isaiah 7:15 stating, “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.” According to one biblical scholar, the Hebrew word in question has a “wide range of semantic coverage” which (acknowledging the breadth of milk byproducts) could in certain contexts also be translated as “sour milk,” “cream” or “curds.”¹⁷

From ancient times on, butter has been prized for its medicinal properties.¹⁸ The Ro­mans applied butter topically for painful joints, and for that same condi­tion, Ayurvedic medicine still prescribes ghee. In addition to helping with painful joints and sore muscles, the Ayurvedic tradition of massage with warm ghee is said to improve circulation, enhance skin health and provide other benefits.¹⁹

Butter and other dairy products are also described in early Chinese materia medica. One entry, referring to a butter oil extract that is “superior in efficacy to butter,” describes it as something that can “[nourish] bone marrow and. . . be used as a topical medication.”²⁰ A medical text from the Daoist canon recommends deriving an extract from “good butter” as a remedy for “all illnesses of the lungs, coughs, and when pus and blood do not cease.”²⁰ And rules for Buddhist monks who were ill included a “seven-day prescription” consisting of “butter oil, honey, rock honey, fat, and fresh butter.”²⁰

The recurrent mentions of ghee and butter extracts in these ancient healing traditions are particularly interesting in light of Dr. Gerald Pol­lack’s paradigm-shifting research on fourth-phase—also called exclusion zone (EZ)—water. Pollack and co-author Abha Sharma have found that “large EZs” form next to ghee (as well as next to coconut oil and lard), with cold ghee surfaces producing “especially large EZs.”²¹ This EZ buildup, they conclude, “may be a critical feature underlying the health-promoting function of fats such as ghee.”

Throughout history, butter also has played an important economic role as a “valued commodity,”²² becoming a notable feature of the Scan­dinavian and Irish economies centuries ago.²³ In the American colonies and early United States, families learned that they could trade or sell their butter surplus. As one historian of the U.S. explains, the key play­ers in this regard were women: “Though men tended to ignore butter production, it became a valuable way for women to profit off their farms. Women used the revenue from butter sales to buy household goods,” whereas “men used the revenue from selling grain and animals to buy farm equipment and more land.”²⁴ “Women’s butter”—buttressed by stable demand and prices—became particularly important during economic downturns, cushioning households against wider economic instability. As of 1840, butter—still mostly made on farms—was “the fifth most valuable agricultural product in the mid-Atlantic region.”²⁴ (Other “high-value” agricultural products of the day included wheat, maple sugar, salted meat and, of course, whis­key.²⁵)

A COMPLEX FAT

Butter—made by separating the milk fat in cream from liquid buttermilk—is simple in concept. However, as McLagan explains, it is actually a “very complex fat,” containing more than five hundred different fatty acids and four hundred types of volatile compounds. In North America, butter’s fat content is set at 80 percent (the European standard is a slightly higher 82 percent), with water and a small percentage of milk solids comprising the remaining 20 percent.⁶

Once upon a time, before the advent of mass-produced butter, butter-eaters experi­enced more seasonal variability. The direct link between flavor and what a cow eats meant that the deeper yellow butter from pastured cows in spring and early summer might come with “floral and herbal notes,” while winter butter would have been paler and milder in flavor.⁶

Dr. Price’s pioneering research also es­tablished a direct link between what cows eat and butter’s nutritional properties. When cows were grazing on rapidly growing green grass, it not only produced a “marked change in the color of the butterfat”²⁶ but greatly enhanced the butter’s vitamin content. This led him to use “high-vitamin butter oil” (in combination with high-vitamin cod liver oil) to help remediate nutritional deficiencies. When Dr. Price plotted mortality statistics for heart disease and pneu­monia from sixteen areas of the U.S. and Canada against levels of vitamins A and D in butter, he noticed seasonal patterns; deaths were at their lowest when the butter’s vitamin content was highest (in late spring/early summer, and with another peak in the fall) and conversely, deaths from the two conditions rose when levels of the two vitamins dropped in the winter butter.^26,27

BUTTER WARS

In addition to its sacred and medicinal overtones, butter naturally has come to hold an exalted place in the kitchen, whether as a “flavor enhancement” or simply a “fundamental ingredient.”¹¹ The deep reverence that butter has inspired in cooks and homemakers throughout the ages can be inferred from a description of the butter-making process collected by the Irish Folklore Commission in the late 1930s, which emphasized that the women doing the churning made sure to say “God bless the Cows” before starting on their labors.²⁸ (Back in the day, the Irish also blessed the cows when taking a drink of milk.)

In modern times, McLagan extolls but­ter for providing a “luscious sensation on the tongue” and a “rich, creamy taste,” asking, “What could be better than a slice of fresh bread slathered with butter? Rich, buttery shortbread, perhaps? A fish doused in a bath of brown butter and capers? Or simple pan juices enriched with a swirl of butter?”⁶ Unfortunately, in different times and places, a variety of forces, both his­torical and “scientific,” have often conspired to deny eaters these simple pleasures.

The first recorded incident of butter going up against a major “doppelganger” was in 1869 during Europe’s Franco-Prussian war, when the first margarine was created.²⁹ With the war driv­ing up the cost of butter and lowering its avail­ability, Emperor Napoleon III offered a prize to anyone who could invent a practical alternative for feeding his soldiers. The winner, Hippolyte Mege-Mouries, churned beef tallow with milk and called it “oleomargarine.”³⁰ This might not have been so bad (at least in terms of health consequences), but when margarine crossed the pond to the U.S. shortly after its invention in France, instead of tallow, the key constituent became cottonseed oil (and later, other vegetable oils).³¹

History tells us that the “Big Butter” representatives of the day were “horrified”³² by the U.S. incursions of “this greasy counterfeit,”³³ and they enlisted state and federal legislators’ help in fighting back. At the state level, states like Pennsylvania banned margarine, others imposed heavy taxes and some “forced margarine to be dyed bright pink so no one could possibly mistake it for butter.”³² At the federal level, Congress imposed a tax via the 1886 Oleomargarine Act and subsequently passed several other pieces of “remarkably severe” antimargarine legislation that persisted until the 1950s.³⁴ Consumers, for their part, did not initially know what to make of the butter substitute. As Nina Teicholz recounts in The Big Fat Surprise,³⁵ butter was “a symbol of America’s pure and hallowed heartland,” and margarine was, therefore, “suspect.” Teicholz adds, “As the first ersatz food to be widely manufactured, [margarine] raised a near-metaphysical question about the essential nature of food.”

Eventually—and ironically—the butter lobby’s efforts against marga­rine backfired. Margarine’s lower price tag was one factor in its favor, and even the ban on yellow dyes proved no deterrent, as “sneaky” companies began selling white margarine with packets of yellow dye that the lady of the house could knead into the product at home.³² The Great Depres­sion also helped margarine hit its stride by creating butter shortages and rationing; it was in 1930 that margarine consumption outpaced butter consumption for the first time.36 After the federal government dropped its margarine restrictions in 1950 and the American Heart Association endorsed margarine as part of a “prudent diet” in 1960,³⁵ margarine was in an even better position to outsell butter and did so continuously from 1957 until 2005,³⁶ when—thanks to bad publicity about trans fats in margarine—butter started making its dramatic comeback.

Even during the decades when butter-bashing was unrelenting health dogma, there were always dissenters, some of whom managed to lay out the flawed scientific logic in the published literature. For example, in a 1986 article titled “Why blame butter?”, one JA Gorringe noted that though butter had become a “favorite scapegoat” for heart disease, “It is possible to argue at least as plausibly that margarine is the culprit.”³⁷ Gor­ringe also quoted a witty and apparently nonconformist London physician named Richard Asher as saying, “Do stop bothering about whether your fats are saturated or unsaturated, help yourselves liberally to butter and stop propagating these erroneous legends.” In a general statement that could apply to the faux claims that butter contributes to heart disease, this very same Asher once wrote,

“It is important to realise that ideas are much easier to believe if they are comforting, and that many clinical notions are accepted because they are comforting rather than because there is any evidence to sup­port them. Just as we swallow food because we like it not because of its nutritional content, so do we swallow ideas because we like them and not because of their rational content.”³⁸

Even with butter’s recent rehabilitation, some researchers (ever mindful of their conventional funding sources) are continuing to hedge their bets. In one article published a decade ago, titled “Is butter back? A systematic review and meta-analysis of butter consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and total mortality,” the authors’ wishy-washy conclusion is that their findings “do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary guidelines on either increasing or de­creasing butter consumption.”³⁹

MORE ERSATZ BUTTER

By 2022, the business website Quartz— which bills itself as an “authoritative guide to the most important stories and trends driv­ing business right now”—was pronouncing margarine “over.”⁴⁰ Unfortunately, with the advent of twenty-first century “pharma food” technologies,⁴¹ butter’s enemies—including (who else?) Bill Gates—have some new tricks up their sleeves.

The latest fake butter to get major press is a lab-manufactured synthetic vegan butter “made from CO2.”⁴² The startup responsible for this culinary travesty, a company cunningly named Savor, has the “blessing” and financial backing of Gates,⁴³ who is helping promote it as “sustainability-focused,” “climate-friendly” and paving the way for—wait for it—“food without farming.” Smithsonian Magazine, shilling for Savor, notes that the company also wants to come up with synthetic alternatives to palm oil and coconut oil.⁴⁴

How does “carbon butter” work? The com­pany’s food engineers “take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules.”⁴³ In addition to the lab-created “fats,” the final ingredients include “a little bit of lecithin as an emulsifier, and some natural flavor and color.” Not to worry, says Savor, the end result “looks and tastes and feels exactly like dairy butter.” Gates admits, “The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first,” but he reassures the public (with somewhat confus­ing semantics) that “butter made from carbon” will reduce the public’s “carbon footprint.”

CBS News reported in August 2025 that Savor “is working directly with restaurants, bakeries and food suppliers,” as well as releasing chocolates made with Savor’s “butter.” It’s any­one’s guess whether food labels will disclose the sleight of hand. Gates has ominously hinted that consumers won’t necessarily be given the choice to opt out: “Our plan can’t be to simply hope that people give up foods they crave.”⁴⁴ Gates probably assumes that people won’t cotton on to the fact that they can combat unhelpful food cravings simply by eating generous amounts of real butter.

BACK TO BUTTER BASICS

A blogger who recently reiterated that butter has been “a symbol of good living” throughout most of human civilization argues:

“[I]t is time to set the record straight; but­ter is packed full of health benefits and outweighs any substitute out there like the highly processed margarine, and greasy vegetable oil-based spreads which don’t even come close to the wholesome, natu­rally rich, and creamy butter.”²³

The Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) agrees. The Foundation has strenuously ob­jected to the nonsensical war on butter since WAPF’s inception. Prompted by the shifting butter zeitgeist, WAPF has declared 2026 the “Year of Butter.” Readers can do their part to ensure that the favorable butter trends continue, by “spreading” the butter message and helping friends and family “melt away” their fears and “stick” with butter. They can also follow Sally Fallon Morell’s frequent advice: we should all spread butter so thickly on our toast that we leave “teeth marks.”

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SIDEBARS

JULIA CHILD ON “COLD FLAVORED BUTTERS”

Cookbook author Jennifer McLagan notes that butter is “an excellent flavor carrier,”⁶ and in her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child acknowledges this fact by devoting half a dozen pages to beurres composés. Describing butter’s many “appetizing uses” when creamed with “herbs, wine, mustard, egg yolks, shellfish meat, or other flavorings,” Child recommends flavored butters for basting, sauce and soup “enrichment,” serving on top of grilled fish or meat, and as a sandwich spread (by creaming butter with egg yolks and herbs). These pages include recipes for:

• Mustard butter
• Anchovy butter
• Garlic butter
• Parsley, tarragon or mixed herb butter
• Shallot butter (with red or white wine)
• Shellfish butter (made with cooked shellfish “debris” or meat and hot melted butter)

Of course, no French cookbook would be complete without also including a recipe for beurre pour escargots (but­ter creamed with shallots, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper) to serve with snails. Child observes that this flavored butter equally well accompanies broiled meats, fish and shellfish.

GOOD THINGS IN BUTTER

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 antimicrobial properties; that is, they fight against pathogenic microorganisms in the intestinal tract. Butter is a unique source of very short-chain butyric acid, important for thyroid health and for diges­tion. Butter also provides the perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids. Arachidonic acid in butter is important for brain function, skin health, feel-good chemicals and prostaglandin balance.

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 the 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, hormones and for brain and nervous system development in the young.

WULZEN FACTOR: A hormone-like substance that prevents arthritis and joint stiffness, the Wulzen factor ensures that calcium in the body is put into the bones rather than the joints and other soft tissues. The Wulzen factor is present only in raw butter and cream; it is destroyed by pasteurization.

BUTTER-MAKING

Before innovations like the centrifugal cream separator, mechanized butter churns and refrigeration technology came along to make industrial-scale butter possible, butter was largely a “small-scale, home-based task.”²² Today, many households still understand the benefits—and pleasure—that come with making small batches of butter. There are many Internet sites that explain the simple process.

In our modern era, some of those advantages include having a say in the (preferably raw, and definitely not ultrapas­teurized) cream used; “really good cream. . . from pastured Jersey or Guernsey cows. . . will be more flavorful, contain more healthy CLAs [conjugated linoleic acids], and have a gorgeous yellow color.”²⁹ In terms of the process itself, the key is to “beat the cream” without overbeating it, which can be done with anything from a “jar with a tight-fitting lid that you shake, a bowl and whisk, an electric stand mixer, or a food processor.”²⁹ Cultured butter further enlivens the butter-making process through the use of cream that has first been fermented (for up to forty-eight hours) with a culturing agent such as cultured buttermilk, plain live-culture yogurt, cultured sour cream or crème fraiche.⁴⁵

Elsewhere in the world, the traditional methods of butter-making initiated by long-ago peoples are still in use by modern-day nomads. Thanks to the Internet, even those who purchase industrial-scale butter in neatly wrapped pack­ages can witness what it was like when people made butter the truly old-fashioned way.⁴⁶

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REFERENCES

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42. Cuff M. “Butter” made from CO2 could pave the way for food without farming. New Scientist, Jul. 9, 2024.
43. Molina T. Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates. CBS News, Aug. 6, 2025.
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