BUTTER: TO SPREAD OR NOT?
With so many conflicting headlines nowadays, it’s hard to know whether butter is good or bad for you. To settle this debate once and for all, researchers analysed the eating habits of more than 126,000 people over a 30-year period. Unlike previous studies, this was the most detailed and powerful examination to date of the effects of eating different types of fats. They found that eating too much saturated fat, including fat from butter and red meat, increases your risk of dying early. The good news is that you can cut your risk by 11-19% by replacing some of the saturated fats in your diet with unsaturated fats such as olive oil and rapeseed oil. People who ate mostly unsaturated fats were also less likely to develop heart disease, stroke, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease than those who ate lots of food containing saturated fat. Other good sources of unsaturated fats include nuts, seeds, oily fish and avocados.