Happy Friday! I hope that your week has been fantastic!
Today I wanted to get back to the topic of food quality. I have toyed around with a few different ways in which to approach this large topic. One of my goals for Food Fact Friday is to share knowledge about what individual foods have to offer in the way of nutrients and support to the body. So I have decided that looking at foods one by one is the way to go. And today I want to start with a kitchen staple….butter!!
Butter is delicious! And makes everything that it is slathered on or put into even more delicious!! While steamed veggies are great, they are 100 times better with a generous serving of butter!
Now let’s get one thing straight here…I am talking about real, made from cow’s milk butter in all it’s golden glory!! Not that fake crap that is engineered to make your taste buds think that it is butter….they know better though. All that other fake stuff is really just a tub of unhealthy oils, chemicals and coloring that is not serving your body well. I will talk more about these next week.
Butter use goes back many, many centuries and was used in nearly all traditional cultures. It was a staple in the diet and these people knew that butter offered a great deal of nutrients, even if they didn’t know the names of those nutrients.
But in 1920, the decline of butter use started. Between 1920 and 1960 consumption fell from eighteen pounds per person per year to just 4 pounds. Coincidently, heart disease began to rise, along with a fear of fat and the use on highly-proceeded vegetable oils. These “healthy” vegetable oils were used to make the fake butter I mentioned earlier.
So what is in butter that makes it so valuable to our health??
Butter is a rich source of vitamin A that is easily absorbed. Vitamin A helps to protect from heart disease, supports growth in children, supports the immune system and more. You can read more about vitamin A here.
There is a great anti-oxidant property to butter. Vitamin A, E, selenium and cholesterol are all strong anti-oxidants that help to rid the body of harmful free-radicals that cause cancer and heart disease.
Butter also contains many short and medium chain fatty acids which have strong anti-tumor effects, helping to protect against cancer. They also help the strengthen the immune system. Part of this immune support comes from that fact that these fat chains are anti-fungal, helping to fight off any intestinal infections and they promote a healthy gut lining. And 80% of your immune system is located in your gut.
Vitamin D is also present. Along with vitamin A, the two help build strong bone and teeth because they are essential for calcium absorption. So butter will help your kiddos grow and protect the ladies from osteoporosis.
The richest butter comes from cows that graze on fresh, green grass. These cows produce a butter that is a deep yellow color and contain what Dr. Weston A Price call the X factor. Today that is believed to be vitamin K2 and is another key component to the growth of healthy children and to help with repairs to the body.
I recommend that you look for a quality grass-fed butter and use it daily!! Heck, in my house we not only top our veggies with it and fry our egg in it, we also put it in our morning coffee!! I know it might sound a little odd but it adds an extra creaminess to each cup of joe and will help to mitigate the effects of the caffeine, all while you are taking in butter’s many nutrients. If you can find a local farmer that is making butter from properly raised animals, even better!! Please let me about this farmer too!
One common brand of butter you can find at most grocery stores now is Kerrygold. And depending where you are, you may have other options as well. But if you can’t find a grass-fed option, picking up any butter will be better then a fake one. Take a look at the ingredients, there should only be two listed…cream and salt. That is all it takes to produce a quality food that will provided with an array of nutrients.
I am curious, do you use butter in your daily cooking? Do you recall your grandparents or great-grandparents making butter? Let me know in the comments.
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