Large Study of Dietary Habits Suggests More Plant Oils, Less Butter Could Lead to Better Health
People who consume plant-based oil instead of butter may experience beneficial health effects and even have a lower risk of premature death, according to a study by investigators from Mass General Brigham, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The researchers examined diet and health data from 200,000 people followed for more than 30 years and found that higher intake of plant-based oils, especially soybean, canola, and olive oil, was associated with lower total, cancer, and cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas butter intake was associated with increased risk of total and cancer mortality. The results are published in JAMA Internal Medicine and presented simultaneously at the American Heart Association EPI/Lifestyle Scientific Sessions.
People might want to consider that a simple dietary swap—replacing butter with soybean or olive oil—can lead to significant long-term health benefits.
“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,” said study lead author Yu Zhang, MBBS, research assistant at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. Zhang is also a student in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School.
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A key difference between butter and oil is the types of fatty acids contained in them. Butter is rich in saturated fatty acids, while plant-based oils have more unsaturated fatty acids. While there have been many studies on dietary fatty acids, fewer studies have focused on their primary food sources, including butter and oils. Many previous studies have looked at a person’s diet at a point in time and have been done in a small population, limiting their applicability to public health.
The study analyzed dietary data from 221,054 participants in the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS), Nurses’ Health Study II (NHSII), and Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS). Every four years, they answered questions about how often they consumed certain types of food. The researchers used the data to estimate how much butter and plant oils they ate.
Read more about the study at massgeneralbrigham.org.