Dietary fats can be tricky business, as they’re not all the same. While some are necessary for optimal health, others need to be balanced and some need to be avoided altogether, and understanding which is which is quite crucial, considering how important fats are for optimal health, as previously noted. Here Leslie Locklear, Food.news, reveals the skinny on butter’s health benefits:

“Not to exaggerate things, but when it comes to culinary customs, the act of spreading a rich, thick smear of butter on freshly baked bread is one that has withstood the test of time.

According to experts, such as food historian and author Elaine Khosrova, butter’s origins go back about 10,000 years to the time when our ancestors first began domesticating animals such as sheep, goats and buffalo.

Obtained by steadily churning fresh or fermented cream or milk to separate the butterfat from the buttermilk, butter usually consists of just butterfat, milk proteins and water. Ingredients such as salt and herbs and spices are sometimes added during the manufacturing process to give the product a much wider variety of flavor.

Due to the butter-making process being a confluence of several chemical processes – the mechanisms of which were unknown to the ancients during that time – butter, as noted by Khosrova in her book Butter: A Rich History, took on a sacred and supernatural reputation in many cultures.

For example, Khosrova said, the Ancient Sumerians would offer up gifts of butter at the temple in honor of the powerful fertility goddess Inanna. In the same way, ancient Indians would offer ghee or clarified butter to the gods in their ceremonies. In contrast, ancient Celts would leave tubs of butter in the Irish marshes as offerings to the faeries and other pagan deities.

For the past few decades, however, butter has suffered from an undeserved bad reputation, especially with regards to its effects on one’s health.

This can be attributed to the fact that butter has a high fat content, which most have linked to several health issues. The good news is that several studies have since come out about butter being a healthy addition to one’s diet – or at least when used in moderation.

“The ‘butter is bad’ era is over, and butter can fit in a nutritious and healthy diet of anyone who enjoys it,” Wendy Bazilian, a dietitian and the author of the Eat Clean, Stay Lean series, said.

“That doesn’t mean [to] eat as much as you want,” Bazilian said, noting that butter derives virtually all of its calories from fat.

But, what’s in butter, really?

Butter consists of one to two percent milk, 16 to 17 percent water, up to 82 percent milk fat, and – in the case of salted butter – perhaps one to two percent salt. It also has calcium, phosphorus, vitamins A, D, and E, and proteins.

Butter, according to experts, is also packed with lactones, diacetyl, methyl ketones, dimethyl sulfide, and fatty acids, all of which are responsible for giving it its distinct flavor.

Butter is a high-calorie food, with one tablespoon or 14 grams of butter packing about a hundred calories or so, which is comparable to the calories one might get from a medium-sized banana.”

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