When I named my business Butter and Sunshine Wellness, I had ancestral nutrition in mind. Butter and sunshine are two of the key ingredients to living a long and healthy life, and thanks to our ancestors, our bodies are programmed to get maximum health benefits out of both.
What happened when I started living a lifestyle that I call Radical Renewal and began to eat butter, along with other saturated fats from healthy animals? My health improved, significantly. I lost 55 pounds. Inflammation markers in my blood work improved so dramatically that my doctor told me I was not pre-diabetic anymore. I had incredible focus for the first time in what felt like decades. I slept better, and, according to those who should know, I rarely snore anymore.
Let me show you exactly how a beautiful golden stick of butter can be for your health: (Hat tip to Bodyecology.com for the basis of this great listicle.)
Butter
- Is rich in easily absorbable form of Vitamin A necessary for thyroid and adrenal health.
- Contains lauric acid, important in treating fungal infections and candida.
- Contains lecithin, essential for cholesterol metabolism.
- Contains antioxidants that protect against free radical damage.
- Is a great source of Vitamins E and K.
- Is a rich source of the vital mineral selenium.
- Saturated fats in butter have strong anti-tumor and anti-cancer properties.
- Contains conjugated linoleic acid, which is a potent anti-cancer agent, and immunity booster.
- Is a source of iodine in highly absorbable form.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent the last 40 plus years believing that butter and sunshine are two of the worst things for my body and that in fact, they might kill me. Avoiding them at all costs, I thought I was staving off weight gain, cardiac disease, skin cancer and aging.
It turns out I was dead wrong.
In fact what I was led to believe was healthy has been upside down all along.
As I’ve learned during my nutritional certifications and in-depth research, our society has been sold a bill of goods about fat, sugar, salt and sun.
Look for future blog posts on the history of the disastrous Standard American Diet (SAD) and how we, as Americans, got where we are today: obese, diabetic and disease ridden.
The bottom line is that what we’ve been told to believe about butter and sunshine (and a host of other things essential to our health), that they might kill us if we partake of them, is quite the opposite.
NOT partaking of butter and sunshine could actually be the very thing that is making us sick, unhealthy and knocking at death’s door too early.
We menopausal and post-menopausal women have had “A LIFE.” For some of us LIFE has been showing up in our bodies as inflammatory and metabolic diseases like arthritis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.
For many of us LIFEis beginning to show on our bodies as weight gain or in a lack of physical energy. It shows up in our mood as low-grade depression and in our inability to focus and take on new projects.
Most women I meet who are my age, in their midlife, have dieted extensively. They have been part of the low fat revolution of the 70s, 80s and 90’s where they learned that animal fats and saturated plant fats (olive, coconut, avocado) are deadly and will “clog up” their arteries. Essentially we all learned that butter would kill us.
When I stopped eating butter in the 1980s it went right along with not eating ANY saturated fats if I could help it. I stuck with the recommended high carb, low fat diets of Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, Slim Fast, the Grapefruit diet, Jenny Craig and others.
If I had fat at all, it was “vegetable” oils like canola, soy, corn and safflower oils. (Notice the quotes, these are not vegetable oils at all, but that’s for another post.)
My guess is, if you are a woman over the age of 40, you have been down this same road.
As I’ve come to learn, eating saturated fats like butter from healthy animals (and fruit and nut oils like coconut, avocado and olive oil) protects the immune system, does not spike insulin, and most importantly is truly anti-inflammatory.
Butter and all those other healthy fats are actually heart and brain protective because guess what? They don’t cause inflammation in the body.
All those decades of restricting saturated fats (not eating butter or any other animal fats) and instead eating either no fats or seed oil fats (like safflower or canola oil) may indeed have factored into many of my health problems.
In fact, a 2016 meta analysis of 636,151 participants in 15 cohort studies from around the world shows butter/saturated fat consumption does not increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, or diabetes.
In my Radical Renewal Program, I teach midlife women how to include healthy fats like butter in their diet to lose weight and gain all the benefits that feeding their body with the right fuel can bring.
Check out my blog about Sunshine and learn why it’s not the evil villain everyone has made it out to be.
Want to work together to get healthy, melt fat and feel like yourself again?