Butter - Gross!

Sometimes something so random totally consumes your mind! In the past 24 hours it has been BUTTER! and followed by a passionate YUGH! =(. So I need to vent-blog my daily 3500 women words and share a bit more about my bad butter experience and why it is consuming my thoughts.

I was waiting for a quote to be sent to me so that I could print it at Postnet yesterday. I guessed it would take an hour or so, I decided I was going to go have a coffee and a bite to eat at the local coffee shop next door to the Postnet. Eish! I ordered a Chicken Kebab Baguette with honey and mustard dressing and a side salad. I waited over an hour and then my baguette arrived with more like honey and mustard butter. I scrapped off 4+ Tablespoons of butter off my roll and left it in a heap on the side of my plate. I may have imagined it but it felt like I could still taste the remaining butter on the roll at 10pm last night. Why this is totally gross - the facts about butter and fat in general is quite a shocker!! It will make you think twice about ever eating butter again and why the excess butter yesterday has got me totally grossed out.

A scraping of butter that one may have on your toast represents 5-10g grams of  fat. Fats and oils contain nine calories per gram. That's up to 90 calories for a scrape of butter on your toast and face it who has just one slice. Have you checked the calories you burn on the machine or on your polar watch when you exercise? ... do you know how long it takes to burn 90 calories at even that intensity of exerting yourself? On top of that, who says that we even burning off that scrape of butter. Your body will burn all the glucose in your bloodstream first - say from the bread - before using the fat's energy. I will get into the digestion briefly next. But through reading its clear that your body basically will burn up glucose for energy that you get from carbs or proteins, but the fat you eat will likely - as the saying goes - go straight to your hips!

It is important to remember that we all have unlimited storage place for fats, I read that for example, patients who have spent a long time in hospital and have lost a lot of weight often need to have their dentures re-adjusted, because they have actually lost fat on their gums (x diet, pg 63). Not even our gums are safe from butter let alone our bums. =)

So for those who need to get technical in the simplest way possible for me to explain on the digestion of fats and why should we should avoid them almost entirely, here goes....

"Dietary fats, like those in butter, meat or cooking oils, are basically organic compounds composed of carbon, hydrogen,and oxygen. They consist of complex molecules and are the most highly concentrated source of energy in our daily diet. They belong to a class of substances called lipids. Unfortunately, dietary fats do not dissolve in water, as a result they are not easily broken down by fat-digesting enzymes (lipase) in the watery content of the gastrointestinal tract.Therefor fats tend to take longer to digest than carbohydrates or proteins". So because fats take longer to digest they tend to get burned up last as an energy source.

Your body will take the extra fatty acids and store them as adipose tissue, better known as body fat. That adipose tissue can be broken down and turned into glucose when you need more calories than you consume. But many people already consume to many or enough calories and therefore never need to burn the excess 'butter in our storage'.
"A healthy digestive system will absorb about 95 percent of the dietary fat that you eat" Doesn't this fact make you want to scream, so its not excreted like many other nutrients or vitamins in excess ... if you have a healthy digestive system you likely to not escape any of the extra butter thats heading straight for your special fat storage places. Another reason it is not excreted  - as stated above - is because fats are not water soluable.

Aparently 'healthy' olive oil is not a totally safe option either. Although we need the fatty acids because they are essential for a healthy heart and low cholesterol levels. Unfortunately the healthy fats are still absorbed and stored in the same way as butter on the gums, hips and thighs! It is better to get your healthy fatty acids in the right doses in a capsule form.

All that butter - oh my hat - what if its gone straight to my gums?