Plaque is the stuff of coronary heart disease. It is CONTROLLABLE, it is STOPPABLE, it is REVERSIBLE.
But you must be equipped with the right information on diet, nutritional supplements, and hopefully the avoidance of medication.
This is the blog that accompanies the 
The diet I advocate in the Track Your Plaque program to gain control over the factors that lead us to coronary plaque and heart attack is a low-carbohydrate diet. We begin with elimination of wheat, cornstarch, oats, and sugars in the context of an overall carbohydrate-reduced diet. We refine the program by monitoring postprandial (after-meal) glucoses.
But not everything low-carb is good for you. Fried sausages, for instance, are exceptionally unhealthy, despite having little to no carbohydrates.
An emerging but potentially very powerful issue is that of Advanced Glycation End-products, or AGEs. There are two general varieties of AGEs: endogenous (formed within the body) and exogenous (formed in food that is consumed).
Endogenous AGEs form in the body as a result of high blood glucose, i.e., glycation. When exposed to any blood glucose level of 100 mg/dl or greater, some measure of glycation will develop due to a reaction between glucose and various proteins, e.g., proteins in the lens of the eye, forming cataracts over time.
Exogenous AGEs form in food, generally as a result of heating to high-temperature. (AGEs is really a catch-all term; there are actually a number of reactions that occur in foods, not all of them involving sugars. However, the “AGE” label is used to signify all the various related compounds. The values quoted here are from Dr. Helen Vlassara’s Mt. Sinai Hospital laboratory; reference below.)
Beef cooked to high-temperature yields plentiful AGEs. One gram of roast beef, for instance, contains 306,238 units. This means that an 8-oz serving yields 13.8 million units AGEs. Compare this to a boiled egg with 573 units per gram, raw tomato with 234 units per gram.
Butter contains an impressive 264,873 units AGEs per gram, the highest content per gram in the entire list of 250 foods tested in the Mt. Sinai study. A couple pats of butter (10 g) therefore contains 2.64 million units. A stick of butter that you might add to cake batter to make a cake therefore yields 30 million units of AGEs.
So there’s nothing wrong with the fat of butter. It’s AGEs that appear to be responsible for the endothelial dysfunction/artery-constricting, insulin-blocking, oxidation and inflammation reactions that are triggered. Among all of our food choices, butter is among the worst from this viewpoint.
Throw in the peculiar “insulinotrophic” effect of butter, and you have potent distortion of metabolic pathways, courtesy of the butter on your lobster.
(AGE data from Goldberg 2004. In this analysis, carboxymethyllysine was the marker used for AGE content.)
Incidentally, the new Track Your Plaque diet will soon be released as chapter 9 of the new Track Your Plaque book on the website.
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questions about butter. first as many have asked, was the butter heated for patuerization? my guess is yes. second, what were the cows feed? standard grain feed would probably lead to ore endogenous AGE in cows compared to a diet of grass. as for now, i am sticking with my grass fed, non pasteurized butter.
Nothing wrong with saying "Whoops. My bad. Thanks for correcting me with your comments guys and gals".
Sorry Doc,
This has been one of your least helpful, and nearly destructive blogs, I've ever seen. If you truly believe butter is not good, why not research how it could be 'better', such as clarifying it into ghee, or buying only grass-fed butter.
So then what do YOU suggest instead as the best possible source of dietary fat???
You must realize that the majority of people buy that horrible slow-poison known as margarine, because it has been billed as 'healthier', and your blog will only strengthen that perception.
It seems like occasionally you go on vacation, and let the TYP committee post an article for you. This one stunk.
The 6-year old study you quoted sounds like it was paid for by the vegetable oil industry.
Anything we swallow gets nearly destroyed by our stomach acids, and who says that carboxymethyllysine (prior to digestion) is a proper marker for eventual AGE cell damage? Wouldn't Uric Acid have an even greater role? OR Hydrogen Peroxide induced in the blood or tissues? Doesn't Glucose, by far, cause the greatest destruction? Remind me what the G in AGE stands for?
Weakly researched or justified blogs like this one make us lose faith in you as an expert.
No apologies from me.
Just because you wish it weren't true, or that the data should be better sorted out, doesn't make it so.
Until we obtain more clarification, butter remains on my list of "watch out."
Wheat is unquestionably bad. Some foods, like spinach and kale, are unquestionably good. Other foods, like butter and other dairy products, have mixed effects.
I'm talking butter here. I'm not insulting your aunt.
I'm not that much of a fan of butter since I've got an autoimmune disorder which seems to get slightly worse with dairy, but, wouldn't ghee/clarified butter remove all/most of the AGEs throught seperation and physical removal of the sugars and proteins, leaving only the pure fat?
Even AGEs from super-heated pasturized butter would be removed…
Unless the fat itself gets glycated
(this is the first time I've heard of this but it seems plausible, and ghee won't get rid of oxidized unsaturated fats from pasturized butter)
Here's something else I don't understand: what makes butter so special in regard to external A.G.E.s as opposed to other low-carb, high-fat foods that it would warrant special attention?
If butter can be filled with A.G.E.s, wouldn't a bunch of other low-carb foods considered healthy now become suspect?
Or is the heating process itself that makes the pasteurized butter they likely tested on the culprit?
(In the same way canola and soybean oils are hot-pressed to reduce toxins and therefore are highly oxidized)
I thought that the butter used in that study was whipped butter. If so, the measured AGE content might be drastically different from normal butter.
Am I missing something, I thought AGEs were a combination of sugars and proteins. The label of my butter says zero carbs and zero protein. So what is glycated ?
"No apologies from me."
“It's not my role to indulge anyone's low-carb fantasies.”
“I'm not insulting your aunt.”
interesting attitude. i'm not real certain that an apology is in order specifically for your article, but perhaps a more in depth look at the 'data' is. the type of people who come here have a veracious appetite to find the real truth, and you are ignoring a host of excellent replies that directly negate the 'data' and 'facts' that you are standing on.
i am not seeing "i love justifying my high fat foods because i am hopelessly addicted to butter" kind of replies here. i am seeing well researched, well articulated points about why the 'data' you presented here (and in your other previous article where you do state as a fact that "butter makes you fat") are not holding up well. And therefore, the quotes from you that I point out above do actually seem to be a bit insulting to your readers. your reply is quite pompous as well.
please keep in mind that we (meaning the collective group of caring folk who frequent your blog) are only making noise on this one for everyone’s good. you may not want to be so hasty in shunning good responses that question your findings, but, uh, it's your call doc, and your reputation.
as always, i appreciate the work you do. even with my disagreement about an article like this, i believe you do a great service to the health community and i sincerely thank you for it.
It's funny you mentioned that spinach and kale are unquestionably good. I can easily find plenty of bad in those two vegetables. High levels of oxalates is one. Kale is also highly goitrogenic. Those two vegetables are also some the most pesticide laden. On top of the pesticides, spinach is often irradiated.
I'll stick with occasional greens and frequent butter consumption.
Hi Dr. Davis:
Please take a look at the daily lipid's post from today, on AGE's. Here is the link:
http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2010/10/is-butter-high-in-ages.html
To paraphrase Henry Ford "nutrition is bunk". No statistically valid long term dietary clinical trial has ever been performed on humans. So we have no statistically valid evidence-based science on what constitutes a healthy diet. In particular the recommendations for eating fruit and vegetables is totally irrational. All vegetables are full of toxins and contain large quantities of known carcinogens. In fact the EPA would be required by law to ban the consumption and sale all vegetables if they were man made.
Nutrition 'science' consists entirely of extremely dubious experiments on rats, meaningless population studies and irrelevant test tube experiments.
@blogblog
What you say is ridicolous.
Consumption of vegetables has always been found to have nothing but extremely positive effects and not even one negative effect, except for people with Chrons.
Not even one evidence of cangerous or toxic effect.
The source of the butter data is this paper: "Advanced Glycoxidation End Products in Commonly Consumed Foods" (2004, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, via Google Scholar cache).
Here are some numbers from Table 1:
Milk, cow, whole …. 0.05 kU/mL
Butter ………….. 265 kU/g
The table caption refers to "foods prepared by standard cooking methods" (these include frying). Expecting high AGEs in uncooked butter — over 5000 times the level in milk! — would make little sense. There's every reason to think that this butter had been exposed to high temperatures.
@anonymous (Nov 3 comment)
Actually, what you say is ridiculous too. I'd be careful not to make blanket statements like that. Built-in defense mechanisms are not reserved for Venus Fly-traps only. Vegetables, like many other plants, have them too.
PLANTS BITE BACK
What do you think about this from Dr Mercola?
Good-old-fashioned butter, when made from grass-fed cows, is a rich in a substance called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). CLA is not only known to help fight cancer and diabetes, it may even help you to lose weight, which cannot be said for its trans-fat substitutes.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/12/07/why-is-butter-better.aspx
According to the chart, a frankfurter or a serving of roast beef is quite a bit worse than a serving of butter.
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/09/age-content-of-foods.html
Butter is not good because it’s low carb. Butter is good because it’s butter.
Before I ever heard of low-carb, or vitamins or minerals or any of that, when ALL I knew about nutrition was that sugar was bad and veggies good cause mom said so, butter was good. Butter made me WANT to eat an artichoke. And… it still works today!
If there were no other benefit to butter than it made vegetables palatable, butter would be an unqualified good. I would not eat 1/10th the veggies I do if not for butter.
Since I am stubbornly of the opinion that eating at least half the diet (by volume) as nonstarchy vegetables is the main thing anyone can do for health, butter is an unqualified good in my world.
If it makes people voluntarily eat their veggies, it’s good.
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While just the veggie intake with butter in the diet is a HUGE good; butter is better than just the vegetables that go with it.
Butter is the number one source of butyric acid, a fatty acid that is a major constituent of the GI tract and often deficient in folks with GI disturbances like celiac and Chron’s and systemic Candida. IMO, the number one thing anyone with GI issues can do is eat lots of butter. If you want to heal even faster, don’t just eat it, but take it in both ends, so to speak.
Butyric acid also counteracts inflammation, the main underlying issue with heart disease as I understand, and the apparent underlying issue with the epidemic of autoimmune disorders we’re seeing.
My grandmother’s generation ate GOBS of bread, wheat was a mainstay of their diet. But they didn’t have all the gluten-intolerance this generation has. IMO, the reason is cause they slathered butter on their bread.
Anyways, she lived to 102, so must’ve done SOMeTHING right. And she never believed the hype about margarine, always overate butter like crazy.
Butyric acid has other interesting effects… it lowers total cholesterol 25%, serum triglycerides 50%, fasting insulin 25%, and increases insulin sensitivity 300% – there’s a bunch of pubmed references listed here: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/12/butyric-acid-ancient-controller-of.html
Note that “metabolic syndrome,” the precursor to T2 diabetes, is pretty much insulin resistance and high triglycerides. When metabolic syndrome is the question, apparently, butter is the answer.
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Butter is particularly good from pasture-raised animals, which maximizes the vitamins A, D3 and K2 in it.
Very few of us get enough vitamin A. Many of us, diabetics being an example I’m terrifically familair with, do not convert beta-carotene to vitamin A well at all. In general, omnivores and carnivores don’t do this efficiently, even the healthy ones with good genes.
Herbivores do it wonderfully. All the gorgeous colors of the pasture convert into lots of real vitamin A for us to eat. You can take nasty cod liver oil, or you can just melt yummy butter on your veggies.
I do not spend 16 hours in the sun in summer. But I rent a small house on a farm and am surrounded by cattle, and they do. They walk about, eating pasture, chewing cud and the calves frolicking across the fields, in the sunshine all day, where they also are making loads of vitamin D3 – the real stuff, not the crappy D2 they “fortify” factory farmed milk with.
Butter from cows eating rapidly growing grass is also the best known source of K2 other than natto. Just like Vitamin A, we are not good at making K2, but cows are.
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IMO, butter is a near-miraculous food, one of the true health foods.
I buy from a farm that makes butter from cream from cows on pasture, with no ingredients except cream. When the beta-carotene content is highest, it turns darker, which is also when the vitamin A, D3 and K2 is highest. When it gets like that, I buy 40 lbs and stick it in my freezer for consumption over the next year. When I run out, I just buy it weekly again until it gets dark again.
I eat between 1/2 – 1 lb butter every week. It’s yummy. As noted, it’s wonderful on vegetables. But it’s also nice just melted over some over-easy eggs, or a pat melted on a burger or steak.
Also, pasture-raised butter tastes better. The stuff I buy comes in tubs, not sticks, but hubby being a truck driver finds sticks more convenient. He buttered a dish with his butter recently before he served it to me and… well, I added the real butter. His butter just wasn’t… buttery enough.
Butter is… just awesome stuff. And for those who REALLY disagree, my advice is to heed Julia Child who said, “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream.”
Like Olga, I”d be very interested to hear your opinion on this daily lipid”s post:
http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2010/10/is-butter-high-in-ages.html
Also, what about ghee?
Apparently the AGEs in the study cited by Dr. Davis were measured using anti-body immunoassay which is an indirect method that is susceptible to distortions. A mass spectrometer, a direct measurement, was used to analysis AGE in butter in this study http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/65A/9/963.full and found: “The CML concentrations of various foods vary widely from about 0.35–0.37 mg CML/kg food for pasteurized skimmed milk and butter to about 11 mg CML/kg food for fried minced beef and 37 mg CML/kg food for white bread crust”.
So wheat in the form of white bread crust is a factor of 100 more than butter in CML AGE.