Gary,
Butter has been consumed for around 4000 years and with no discernible health effects. Civilizations ate dairy products copiously and thrived off meats. There is evidence hinting that the cholesterol from animal fats led to the big brains we have today. Our cells are composed of cholesterol and it is required for thousands of functions, including vitamin D synthesis. This is why people taking statin drugs are urged to get tested for coq10 and vitamin D deficiencies because the mechanism of these drugs disrupt crucial processes. Cholesterol deficiency is also linked to autoimmune disease, depression and many other health ills since serotonin is a major player.
Compared to that time frame I mentioned, Americans only recently stopped eating butter and saturated fats in favor of the low fat diet. That is, the McGovern report was issued in 1977 and this was the point where saturated fats were vilified based on falsified data by Ancel Keys. Everyone took to this dogma and started eating transfats, which the government only recently banned because of it's association with cardiovascular disease and other health issues.
Prior to that report in 1977, everyone cooked with lard or butter. McDonalds lathered their fries with lard. Full fat milk, eggs yolks and bone broths were staples of the American diet. Statisticians know the 40 year window of the low-fat, high carb dogma contributed to the increasing heart disease rates we have today.
It is slowly being accepted now in medical journals that saturated fat was never the culprit in heart disease. There is a trending article in the British Medical Journal on saturated fats that exposes the heart disease - cholesterol myth. It is slowly being accepted in academia, but it will still take another 5-10 years to get accepted.
If you sift through the research, the answers are there. You have to work very hard, but it's there. This is why the paleo diet is slowly seeping it's way into the medical paradigm, with doctors like Terry Wahls leading the charge.
You can take statin drugs or blindly adhere to whatever your doctor tells you, but I choose to question
everything and see if the unadulterated research supports it. In many of the cases, it doesn't and there's a strong financial incentive behind those recommendations.
Post Edited (StealthGuardian) : 11/24/2013 6:09:43 PM (GMT-7)