Thanks to Casey Manion and Bryan Castañeda.
Because of my finding that butter improved my mental speed, in 2012, Dustin Lee, a programmer in Bozeman, Montana, decided to try eating lots of butter. He thought he’d do it for a month.
He ate a half-stick (2 ounces = 57 grams) every day. Nothing fancy: Kirkland Salted Sweet Cream Butter. At first it was repulsive. He had trouble eating it. He ate it with other foods, such as soup or pancakes. Or he would take lots of tiny slices (without other foods). It felt like more butter than he wanted.
After about two weeks of this, however, he decided this is pretty good. He was enjoying it. He began looking forward to the slices. He made them larger. He prefers the butter hard, straight out of the fridge. He now enjoys eating the fat on meat. He stopped limiting how much animal fat he eats. (His wife still cuts it off meat.) Now he gets lots of fat from lots of sources. Butter is the easiest source.
His children (7 and 9 years old) don’t eat butter directly, but he allows them to eat as much as they want. They eat a lot more butter than other children. At other people’s houses, he jokes about it. Incidentally, he tried taking Vitamin D3 in the morning (around 7 am) but it made him so sleepy in the evening he stopped.
This impressed me. I’d been eating a half-stick of butter per day for a few years (half as much was less effective), but I always ate it with a little bit of meat, e.g., sliced roast beef (Berkeley) or roast pork (Beijing). That was less than ideal because I kept running out of the meat. I started eating it Dustin’s way (straight) and found it’s fine. It’s like dessert, halfway between ice cream and cheese.
On the Shangri-La Diet forums, babyhopes wrote:
At 10 am, I NCd [nose-clipped] a cup of milk, coffee and 2 small spoons of butter (I really like the anti-depressant effects of butter so I am making it part of my breakfast every day)
I noticed something similar the first time I ate a lot of butter (about 60 g). It was at lunch. A few hours later I felt a pleasant warm feeling in my head. The butter was the only unusual thing I had eaten.
When I googled “butter antidepressant” the first result was this blog — I wrote about this three years ago. Well, here is new evidence.
Thanks to Anne Weiss and Dave Lull.
A German study published in 2001 measured the effect of starkly different breakfasts (all fat, all protein, or all carbohydrate) on cognition during the next hours. Participants (17 men in their 20s) ate the same packaged dinner at home and next morning came to the lab and ate different breakfasts. All of the breakfasts were “cream-like” and all contained 400 calories. The design was relatively sophisticated. Practice effects were reduced by giving considerable practice with the tests before the main measurements began. Brain tests included a simple reaction time task, a choice reaction time task, and a “combi-test” in which the subject does two things at once that provides six measures of performance. One set of tests took 15 minutes. The tests were done once/hour for 3 hours after the breakfast.
The simple reaction time test showed no difference between the breakfasts. The choice reaction time test and the combi-test did show differences: The all-fat breakfast was better. The improvement produced by the fat breakfast compared to the other two breakfasts was clearest about two hours after the breakfast.
EMG (brainwave) measurements showed no differences between the breakfasts.
These results agreed with previous work.
Cunliffe et al. (1997) reported that a pure fat meal did not increase reaction times in contrast to carbohydrate ingestion when measured hourly for 4 h after the meal. In our study, fat ingestion even improved reaction times compared with baseline. Our subjects scored best for all tasks of the combi-test after the fat meal. This finding is in line with the higher accuracy of a focused attention task after a high-fat meal compared with a low-fat meal reported by others (Smith et al. 1994).
The “fat” breakfast in this study was 25% soybean oil (high in omega-6), 25% palm oil (high in saturated fats) and 50% cream (high in saturated fats). I have not compared omega-6 to nothing but I suspect it would produce worse results, given that olive oil appears worse than nothing. So I suspect that the improvement due to fat was due to the palm oil and cream. I concluded, based on evidence that I and others collected, that butter (high in saturated fats) improves arithmetic speed. I usually ate 30 g (= 2 tablespoons = 270 calories) of butter twice/day. Close to the dosage of this experiment. The timing of the effects I saw (sharp improvement from one day to the next) is consistent with a change that happens within 2 hours.
These results, which I didn’t know about until recently, support my earlier conclusions about butter. My measurements cost almost nothing whereas this experiment must have cost thousands of dollars ($400/subject?) plus hundreds of hours of researcher time. Maybe I should compare cream and butter. Cream has advantages. Mark Frauenfelder suggested using cream to make yogurt. Superfood!
A more recent study found saturated fat consumption correlated with cognitive decline. It was a survey, however, with many differences between the groups being compared. I trust experimental evidence much more than survey evidence.
The New York Times recently ran a story about a 107-year-old woman named Juliana Koo, who lives in New York City. Her longevity secrets are remarkably close to what I say on this blog:
“Somebody asked her the secret of long life,” said Ying-Ying Yuan, a step-granddaughter of Mrs. Koo. “She said, ‘No exercise, eat as much butter as you like and never look backwards.’”
Shirley Young said her mother also likes pork bellies, “especially the hot part, but she doesn’t overdo anything.”
“And she doesn’t take any medicine,” she said. “When doctors give her medicine, she usually hides it, or when she takes something, she takes half a pill. People keep on giving her Chinese herbs, things like that. She never takes them.”
I found that butter made me faster at arithmetic. This contradicted the usual view that butter is unhealthy. However, there is plenty of evidence that the usual view is wrong. The latest issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition contains another example. An epidemiological article titled “Dietary intake of saturated fat by food source and incident cardiovascular disease: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis” found a negative correlation between dairy fat and heart disease:
Although dietary recommendations have focused on restricting saturated fat (SF) consumption to reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, evidence from prospective studies has not supported a strong link between total SF intake and CVD events. . . . After adjustment for demographics, lifestyle, and dietary confounders, a higher intake of dairy SF was associated with lower CVD risk [HR (95% CI) for +5 g/d and +5% of energy from dairy SF: 0.79 (0.68, 0.92) and 0.62 (0.47, 0.82), respectively].
However, saturated fat from meat was associated with more heart disease:
In contrast, a higher intake of meat SF was associated with greater CVD risk [HR (95% CI) for +5 g/d and a +5% of energy from meat SF: 1.26 (1.02, 1.54) and 1.48 (0.98, 2.23), respectively].
It isn’t obvious how to explain the interaction (the direction of association of saturated fat depends on whether it is in dairy or meat). The authors conclude:
Associations of SF with health may depend on food-specific fatty acids or other nutrient constituents in foods that contain SF, in addition to SF
This recent article also questions the idea that dairy fat causes heart disease. One more reason to question conventional nutritional advice.
One day in 2009, I ate a large amount of pork belly (very high in fat — pork belly is the cut used to make bacon). That night I slept an unusually long time. The next day I had more energy than usual. This led me to do an experiment in which I ate a pork belly meal (with lots of pork belly, about 250 g) on some days but not others. I compared my sleep after the two sorts of days. I kept constant the number of one-legged stands I did each day because that has an effect. During the first half of the experiment I kept this constant at 4; during the second half, at 2. I originally posted the results only from the first half.
Now I’ve analyzed the results from both halves. Here are ratings of how rested I felt when I woke up, on a scale where 0 = 0% = not rested at all and 100 = 100% = completely rested.
The two halves were essentially the same: pork belly produced a big improvement. Here are the results for sleep duration.
No clear effect of pork belly in either half of the experiment.
The main thing I learned was that pork fat really helps. The effect is remarkably clear. With micronutrients, such as Vitamin C, the body has considerable storage. It may take months without the nutrient to become noticeably deficient. With omega-3, which is between a micronutrient and a macronutrient, my experiments found that it takes about two days to start to see deficiency. With pork fat there seems to be no storage at all. I needed to eat lots of pork fat every day to get the best sleep. That repletion and depletion are fast made this experiment easy. How curious we are so often told animal fat is bad when an easy experiment shows it is good, at least for me.
Thanks to David Cramer.
Thanks to Jonathan Graehl.
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