Almost pure milk fat — a cooking medium, not a health food, and fine in that role.
Butter is milk fat separated from the rest of the milk by churning. It is roughly
80% fat, a little water, and traces of milk solids. That is essentially the whole story
nutritionally, and it is why butter should be judged as a cooking fat rather than as a food
in its own right.
The decades-long war on butter has softened. Saturated fat is not
the simple villain it was presented as in the 1980s, but it has not been exonerated either.
The honest position is that butter in small amounts, in a diet that is otherwise sensible,
is not the thing that will decide your health.
Per 100g. Butter is one of the few foods where the fat content is the nutrition.
Based on the nutrients and fibre this food supplies. These are supporting foods, not treatments.
Use it where it earns its place. Butter on toast, in pastry, or
finishing a sauce is doing something no other fat does. Butter as your default frying medium
is just calories.
It burns at a lower temperature than you think. The
milk solids in butter scorch around 150°C, which is why butter blackens in a hot pan. For
high-heat cooking use ghee or oil, and add butter at the end for flavour.
Salted or unsalted rarely matters outside baking, where the salt content
affects the recipe. For everything else, buy whichever you like.
There is no mechanism here worth dressing up. Butter is concentrated energy with fat-soluble vitamins along for the ride. Its value is that it makes vegetables and whole grains taste good enough that people actually eat them — which is a real benefit, just not the kind that gets a headline.
High cholesterol or heart disease: butter is high in saturated
fat. Current guidance still points toward limiting it, and swapping some butter for olive oil
is one of the better-supported dietary changes there is.
Milk protein
allergy: butter contains small amounts of milk protein and is not safe.
Lactose intolerance: butter contains very little lactose and is usually
tolerated fine.
This is information, not a prescription. If you are managing a diagnosed condition or taking medication, talk to your doctor before making a large change to your diet.
Nutrition figures on this page come from standard food composition data. These links let you check the numbers and read the underlying research yourself rather than taking our word for it.