Soft facts about butter cause confusion: Don’t ignore the science
By Joseph W. McFadden, Associate Professor of Dairy Cattle Biology in the Department of Animal Science at Cornell University
Humanity is faced with unprecedented challenges. These include a pandemic, economic volatility, poverty, war, climate change, and a growing human population; however, we have created a new problem that has abruptly influenced how we raise animals for food. The critical issue that has emerged in Canada is that hard butter refuses to soften.
You would think that this is just an amusing empirical observation and at most a minor inconvenience, but human curiosity has provoked the spread of misinformation about science, dairy production, and the food we eat. It has been labeled by social media and news outlets as “buttergate”. Innocently, Canadians wanted to know why their butter was hard and not soft at room temperature. Some assumed it was because farmers were feeding their cows diets containing supplemental saturated fat. But the argument has led to uninformed rhetoric about palm oil that, if unchecked, can have drastic consequences for food security and the environmental impact of the dairy sector. People are now demanding answers and invoking irrational decision-making that influences how milk is produced.
The hardness of butter is directly influenced by its fat (fatty acid) composition. Palm oil contains saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Butter composed of a lower proportion of unsaturated fatty acids is softer than butter containing more saturated fatty acids. For more than a decade, farmers have been feeding their cows products derived from palm oil to increase the content of fat in milk. Because of the increased demand for butter post-pandemic, some argue that the observed increase in butter hardness is because cows are being fed more saturated fat from palm oil.
Indeed, milk fat synthesis in cows incorporates dietary saturated fat into milk fat but the cow also synthesizes saturated fatty acids in the mammary gland. Without evaluating milk fatty acid composition, it is not possible to determine whether the observed increase in butter hardness is solely attributed to increased dietary saturated fat supply. Decreases in dietary unsaturated fats could also explain increased butter hardness. This argument has merit considering that cows fed pasture grasses in summer produce milk fat with a higher proportion of unsaturated fatty acids that may yield a softer butter. We also need to recognize that changes in other dietary components, for example starch, influence milk fatty acid composition and thus the properties of butter.
I ask the public to realize that saturated fat is a natural component of the cow’s diet regardless of what they eat and the cow makes saturated fatty acids on her own. These processes haven’t changed much as the cow evolved over centuries.
One argument that has been linked to buttergate is that consuming palm oil or butter made from cows fed supplements derived from palm oil is dangerous to human health. The belief that the presence of any single nutrient (e.g., a saturated fatty acid) in your diet increases your risk for heart disease is archaic. Current scientific evidence suggests that the consumption of saturated fat or palm oil as part of a healthy diet in the absence of weight gain does not increase cardiovascular disease risk. In fact, replacing saturated fat with refined carbohydrates may increase your risk of heart disease. It is misleading to advise the public to avoid a single nutrient without considering the nutrient it replaces or interactions between nutrients in a human diet. We also need to be careful when promoting plant-based diets without considering the benefits that animal-sourced foods provide.
Passionate advocates for milk production reform claim that the palm industry is unsustainable. Indeed, deforestation and shrinking biodiversity are real concerns we cannot ignore. Expansion of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia has slowed but demand is projected to increase to meet future demand across multiple sectors. In 2004, The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil with more than 4,000 members was created. Because of their actions, one-fifth of all palm oil made today is certified sustainable. This must increase. But we can’t forget that cows are expected to produce more milk and milk components like fat when palm fat products are fed. This means that the efficiency to produce milk increases. More milk produced per cow means we need less cows and natural resources like land and water to produce an equivalent amount of milk. This also means less greenhouse gas emissions per liter of milk produced. A complete life cycle assessment of palm oil production and use is required to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs.
In a matter of a few days, comments about hard butter on social media have people calling for a ban on palm fat feeding to dairy cows without considering its impact on food security. It’s unlikely that most food consumers realize that the same fatty acids found in palm fat will still be in milk regardless of how the cow is fed. They may not realize that decreasing dietary energy to the cow by not feeding supplemental fats has the potential to decrease the efficiency of milk production and increase the environmental impact from the dairy sector. Cows also need energy from dietary fats to support health and fertility. Reducing the nutrient density of milk is also unwarranted when people choose to eat this food for nourishment and healthy living. As humanity faces unprecedented challenges, and food insecurities develop, we must actively work to understand the science and impact before reacting.
Dr. Joseph W. McFadden is an Associate Professor of Dairy Cattle Biology in the Department of Animal Science at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He studies dairy cattle nutrition and the effects of diets on animal and human health.
