There is No Such Thing as 'Plant Butter'

The food processors who produce a popular brand of ‘spread’ now have come out with a product that they have misnamed ‘plant butter.’ It comes in varieties that contain olive oil or avocado oil, but the one I looked at online ALSO contained the dreaded ‘canola’ oil (a trade name for rapeseed oil) and ‘pea protein.’ 

OK, here’s the thing: I live in the dairy capital of upper Michigan, Menominee county. My home is a former dairy farm, as are the two homes nearest mine. There are several currently-working dairy farms on my road. And so I know: butter is a DAIRY product. It comes from cows’ lady parts (or goats’ lady parts or sheeps’ lady parts, or I suppose yaks’ lady parts) and there is no such thing as a ‘butter plant’ with udders you can squeeze to get ‘plant butter.’ 

It used to be that dairy farmers were more defensive of their product. They would raise a fuss if imitation soy based drink was called ‘soy milk.’ They would give out awards to local restaurants who used real butter and not margarine or spread. 

I grew up eating margarine as a kid because of our society’s fat-phobia. Now I learn that the butter-substitutes we used back then were very unhealthy— full of trans-fats, hydrogenated oils, and over-refined cheap oils. 

Now we know that healthy fats are important in the diet— see the 1957 study from Kekwick and Pawan ‘Metabolic Study in Human Obesity with Isocaloric Diets High in Fat, Protein or Carbohydrate’ in Metabolism Clinical and Experimental, a scientific journal, which shows that diets high in fat were more effective in producing weight loss. 

My answer to the ‘plant butter’ scam: eat real butter. Grass-fed butter like Kerrygold is good if you can afford it. If you are dairy-sensitive, try ghee, which is made from butter. You can make it yourself at home, and I’m planning to write a blog post about it once I try making some myself.

If you want extra-virgin olive oil or avocado oil on your food, don’t buy ‘plant butter.’ You can just brush some of the actual oil over your food. You can even do this with low-carb gluten-free bread substitutes such as ‘Atkins Diet Revolution Rolls’ or one of my own recipes (I will share the latest version on this blog, soon.)

RECOMMENDED READING:

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, 2008 Reviews the science behind dietary theories like low-fat and low-carb.

Real Food Keto by Jimmy Moore & Christine Moore, NTP, 2019 Chapter 4 will educate you about fats— the good and the bad.

Ketotarian by Dr. Will Cole, 2018. If you just have to do a ‘plant based’ diet, you can still do keto. Author was a podcast co-host with Jimmy Moore.

Keto is not a 'High-Protein Diet'

Sometimes they like to describe the Keto/lowcarb/Atkins dietary lifestyle as ‘high-protein.’ A diet meal-replacement bar that’s sold to the low-carb market is called a ‘protein bar.’ Protein, protein, protein. Why do they say it? Because the real truth is too shocking.

The acronym LCHF shows us the way. Low carbohydrate, high fat. Yes, fat. Fat, fat, fat! Which is a direct contradiction to the current fad diet, the low-fat low-calorie semi-starvation diet. (LFLCSS?) We eat FAT because natural (not artificial trans-fats) fats are healthy and necessary. There are vitamins we need that come in fat. Eating a zero-fat diet, were that possible, would soon make us vitamin-deficient, sick and dead. 

Our dietary lifestyle is MODERATE, not high, in protein. If we are ‘being good’ on our diet, we are not TRIMMING the fat on our meat, but choosing meat portions that are NOT pre-trimmed and low-fat. This can be hard to find. I shop mainly at a very small local grocery, which assumes everyone is on a low-fat diet and wants their meat trimmed of all visible fat. I wanted a little beef the other day and could not find ONE piece that had a bit extra fat. I guess I have to shop further afield, or buy more meat from the meat guy at the farmers’ market next season. I DO have a freezer. Just don’t have the disposable income to fill it.

There are a lot of hybrid diets out there, some even calling themselves a version of Atkins, that try to combine low-carb and low-fat ideas. This leaves you with little but boneless, skinless chicken breast atrocities to eat. Which  can lead to the dreaded high-protein diet. 

There are two reasons why high-protein is bad. First, your body can turn extra protein into sugar. This happens more as you grow older, and is more of a risk factor if you are obese, prediabetic or diabetic. (And ‘old’ is a relative term now that obese teens are getting the older-adult disease of T2 diabetes!)

Second, if you have kidney problems, a high-protein diet is not recommended. Your body can not handle excesses of protein. In my own case, I’m T2 diabetic and have had a bad kidney test or two (it’s better when I’m on strict Keto.) I use fat to stay unhungry while keeping my protein portion not too excessive. (Choosing meat with more fat in it naturally helps, and using rich sauces aids in the case of leaner meats.) 

Another problem with the necessarily high-protein LCLF (low-carb, low-fat) is that it mimics rabbit starvation. Rabbit starvation happened among clueless pioneers and men lost in a wilderness. They could hunt plenty of rabbit to eat, but couldn’t find other foods or a bigger variety of game. Rabbit is very low-fat meat. With it as the only food, people would die. I believe in one of my sources on this they said that people died on rabbit-starvation diets quicker than they would if they ate nothing at all. 

We don’t want that! It’s cheaper to just starve to death than to kill yourself on an all-lean-meat rabbit-starvation-mimicking plan. Or why not just have a couple of nice chicken thighs, followed by a bulletproof hot chocolate?