Rada Rouse EATING and cooking with butter are a recipe for shortening your life, according to findings from large, long-running cohort studies.

US research shows that higher butter intake is associated with higher mortality, whereas there is an inverse association between plant oil intake and mortality.

Harvard-led researchers drew on data for individuals who logged their dietary consumption every four years for up to 33 years, allowing analysis

of the effect of long-term intake of saturated versus unsaturated fats on mortality.

Among the 221,000 participants from three different studies, nearly 51,000 deaths occurred, including more than 12,000 due to cancer and 11,000 due to CVD.

The US National Institutes of Health – funded study found that the highest consumption of butter was associated with a 15 % higher risk of death over the research period than the lowest consumption.

Higher butter intake was also linked to increased risk of cancerspecific mortality.

Conversely, the highest intake of plant-based oils— such as canola, olive and soybean( but not corn or safflower)— was linked to a 16 % lower risk of total mortality, as well as lower cancer and CVD mortality.

Furthermore, the researchers worked out that active substitution of butter with healthy oils was associated with a 17 % reduction in both total mortality and cancer mortality.

“ The present results indicate that replacing three small pats of butter( approximately 15g) with one tablespoon of plant-based oil( approximately 15g) in the daily diet could contribute to lowering the risk of premature mortality,” the team wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

They noted that the study findings were in line with existing US dietary recommendations for minimising saturated fat intake. JAMA Intern Med 2025; 6 Mar.