For Butter or Worse

Do we have a butter deficiency in our diets?  Can it help with longevity and with chronic pain?  According to Sally Fallon the founding President of the Weston Price Foundation and author of the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook, we very well might.  According to Fallon at the turn of the 20^th century the average American ate about eighteen pounds of butter per year. Today, a little over a hundred years’ later Americans eat about 5.5 pounds per year. The main reason for this reduction has been the demonization of saturated fat in the past 70 years and its implied association with heart disease, which is the number one reason for death in the U.S.  Is this association justified? Butter is 70% saturated fat, 25% is monounsaturated fat, and 2.3% is polyunsaturated fat.  For people who have elevated Lipoprotein a Lp(a), which is a test for familial hypercholesterolemia and for those with elevated Apolipoprotein B (ApoB), which is the lipoprotein that is most often seen elevated with those with heart disease caution should be noted. Incredibly these two tests are rarely checked on your annual blood test and instead overall cholesterol is often the sole misplaced reason for the recommendation for statin medications and what unnecessarily drives the fears of patients nationwide. Butter could elevate HDL and LDL, but the HDL is more protective of the arterial walls and the LDL has different components and it is the VLDL cholesterol which more of a problem than LDL and butter does not elevate the VLDL.