Does Butter Consumption Raise Cardiovascular Risk?

Butter consumption is only weakly associated with mortality, not associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD), and inversely associated with the incidence of diabetes, according to a recent meta-analysis.

Although dietary guidelines recommend avoiding foods high in saturated fat, emerging evidence suggests dairy products and dairy fat may have cardiometabolic benefits.
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To examine how butter consumption affects all-cause mortality, CVD, and diabetes in the general population, the researchers searched 9 databases for all studies related to butter consumption and cardiometabolic outcomes.

For their analysis, the researchers included 15 country-specific cohorts reporting on 636,151 participants. The analysis included 28,271 total deaths, 9,783 cases of incident CVD, and 23,954 cases of incident diabetes. Butter consumption was standardized across all studies to 14 g/d, corresponding to a single US Department of Agriculture-estimated serving of butter.

Butter consumption was only weakly associated with all-cause mortality; was not significantly associated with CVD, coronary heart disease, or stroke; and had a minor inverse association with incidence of diabetes.

“This systematic review and meta-analysis suggests relatively small or neutral overall associations of butter with mortality, CVD, and diabetes,” the researchers concluded.

“These findings do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary guidelines on either increasing or decreasing butter consumption, in comparison to other better established dietary priorities; while also highlighting the need for additional investigation of health and metabolic effects of butter and dairy fat.”

—Amanda Balbi

Reference:

Pimpin L, Wu JHY, Haskelberg H, Del Gobbo L, Mozaffarian D. Is butter back? A systematic review and meta-analysis of butter consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and total mortality [published online June 29, 2016]. PLoS One. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158118.