Low-fat turkey meat, a bagel, cornflakes, margarine and soda are all worse for you than butter.
A study authored by Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston, has declared butter a "neutral" food. It isn't good for you, but it isn't bad for you either.
There is no link between consuming butter and an increased risk of heart disease or stroke, the study said. It actually found that butter might slightly prevent Type 2 diabetes.
"Overall, our results suggest that butter should neither be demonized nor considered 'back' as a route to good health," Mozaffarian said.
The findings "do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary guidelines on either increasing or decreasing butter consumption," the researchers wrote.
The researchers analyzed nine eligible research studies representing 636,151 unique individuals with a total of 6.5 million person-years of follow-up.
The average butter consumption across the nine studies ranged from one-third of a tablespoon per day to 3.2 tablespoons per day. The study found small or insignificant differences in terms of total mortality, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
In four of the nine studies, people who ate butter daily had a 4 percent lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. But those findings need to be further explored, Mozaffarian cautioned.
