Sunday, November 27, 2016

My view on cream and butter

The pendulum as to whether butter is good for you or not has swung in favour of it being the former.
The fat on hunted animals millennia past would have been pretty thin as they themselves would have been using their energies keeping themselves from being predated upon. Thus the cattle we enjoy from our butchers graze and exercise little and thus accumulate the fat that we see surfacing our steaks, much more in evidence as compared with their wild counterparts deer, elk, moose etc. which are very shy of fat. It would seem therefore that we were not really designed to eat a lot of fat but no doubt designed to eat some as it would have inevitably been present those millennia ago. Of course we have to ask were we taking the fat off the animals we hunted and cooking it as we do now? It is likely such fat was eaten raw or best warm when fires were first used in food preparation.
The Inuit, as little as a few decades ago were eating seal blubber raw and they with, their enviable health record, seem not to have suffered the cardiovascular problems we associate with animal fat. It may be that cooking of animal fat is the problem. I find that cured pork belly fat is really delicious and that in my hands has never been cooked - it can be got with some nice muscle running through it, and can be cured by just drying and repeated coating during this process with Tamari or Bragg's soy - these being wheat free. Of course one doesn't won't to be allergic to pork!
Having owned up to my inadequacy in advise over animal fats on the heart and arteries I| think where we might be on firmer ground is where fat fits into the health of our immune system.
I have a hunch that many of the health problems that might accrue from dairy products is from the protein that they have. Milk, cheese, yogurt might not be innocent - they are essentially protein or have a protein backbone and this is the problem.
What upsets the immune system is protein and amino acids and it is these that that need to be compatible with ourselves. What we don't want is the system that keeps infection and cancer at bay to become exhausted. Eating the wrong proteins can do that and it is seen in many debilitating diseases eg coeliac disease and the anaphylaxis seen where a morsel or so of  peanut and seafood contamination has occurred and caused a life threatening situation.
Cream and butter are low in protein and high in fat. It is this that, to my mind, will make them a safer bet for many rather than the other high protein dairy products.
This should promote thinking of a healthy ice cream - usually rotten with sugar 20-24% in cheap brands and down to 11 - 15% in upmarket brands. I should say to be safe - a healthier ice cream!
This will be essentially pure cream mixed with fruit and maybe something healthy stabiliser such as psyllium to hold it together when it has come off being hard frozen.



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