Remember when the Powers-That-Be told you that butter is bad for you and that you should use margarine made from linoleic acid-based,polyunsaturated vegetable oils instead?

Those Powers-That-Be should be apologizing to you!

Researchers recovered a huge controlled trial—dating between 1968 and 1973—conducted by the University of Minnesota, which tested whether dietary interventions could reduce the risk of heart attacks or deaths on 9,423 men and women. The investigators found men and women who switched from butter and other saturated fats to corn oil did – indeed – lower their cholesterol levels, however, there were no marked changes in their risk for heart attacks, deaths from heart attacks, or overall death.

North Carolina researchers also performed their own analysis and verified the cholesterol-lowering effect of the dietary intervention from butter to linoleic acid. But they also exposed some unsettling findings: Based on recovered autopsy records, the corn oil group from that 1968-1973 trial had almost twice the number of heart attacks as the control group. Further, women and patients older than 65 suffered about 15 percent more deaths during the trial compared to their control counterparts. What’s more, when study author Daisy Zamora, Ph.D., and her team recovered more unpublished data from another trial (this time from the Sydney Diet Heart Study circa 2013), they found the same thing: more instances of heart disease and death among linoleic acid intervention participants.

The nutrition properties of butter improve with how much grass is in a cow’s diet, according to materials from the Journal of Dairy Science. Grass-fed butter has more healthy fatty acids, which can be stored within your muscle cells as intramuscular triglycerides and can act as a fuel source during exercise.

So, worry less about saturated fat from healthy, whole foods like grass-fed beef, coconuts and coconut oil, eggs and, yes, even butter.  Worry more about your sugar, starch, alcohol and overall calorie intake.  And with regard to meat byproducts, going organic also helps because animals store toxins they are exposed to in their fat.  So, healthy animals mean better, healthier byproducts.

Posted in Ray Ellis