
It’s a cook’s maxim that everything’s better with butter. Except your health, a new study suggests. People who eat loads of butter have a higher risk of premature death, while those who use mostly plant-based oils like canola or olive oil have a lower-than-average risk, researchers found. What’s more, swapping butter out for plant-based oils like canola or olive oil causes a person’s risk of premature death to drop dramatically, researchers reported in JAMA Internal Medicine. Substituting 10 grams of butter a day — less than a tablespoon — with plant-based oils could lower by 17% a person’s risk of death from any reason and from cancer specifically, results show. “What’s surprising is the magnitude of the association that we found — we saw a 17% lower risk of death when we modeled swapping butter with plant-based oils in daily diet. That is a pretty huge effect on health,” lead investigator Yu Zhang, a research assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a news release. The findings are based on diet and health data from more than 220,000 people followed for more than three decades as part of three long-term studies of health professionals. Every four years, participants answered questions about their diets. Total butter intake included butter and margarine blends, spreadable butter and butter used for baking and frying at home.… read on > read on >