Man who ate 100 tablespoons of butter over ten days reveals what it did to his body
Topics: Health, News, Food and Drink
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/drekberg
Topics: Health, News, Food and Drink
A man challenged himself to eat 100 tablespoons of butter over ten days to see how it impacted his body.
Yes, you read that correctly.
We've long been told that products high in saturated fats — like butter — are bad for us, and that we should limit the amount that we have.
As well as butter, saturated fats are found in foods like red meat, full-fat dairy products, coconut oil, ice cream and baked goods.
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It's said that only five to six percent of our daily calorie intake should come from such fats, as studies have shown that high saturated fat intake increase some heart disease risks and stroke, explained Healthline.
It's also associated with weight gain, and people are encouraged to eat more monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats (seen as a healthier alternatives) instead.
However, Dr. Sten Ekberg wanted to look into this further and see just how his own body reacted to eating more fats — specifically butter.
Over a ten day period, Dr. Ekberg ate a whopping 100 tablespoons of butter and the results of doing so were very surprising.
Breaking down his diet over this time frame, Dr. Ekberg said that fats made up 78 percent of his diet, while protein and carbs made up 15 and 7 percent respectively.
Saturated fats wise, he was having eight times as much as he was supposed to have as part of a traditionally 'healthy' diet.
With this in mind, current models would have predicted that Dr. Ekberg's triglycerides (a type of fat that circulate in your blood and are stored in your fat cells) will have drastically increased, and that his insulin resistance would increase as well.
As expected, it was projected that he'd gain weight from eating so much fat too.
But, much to his surprise, this wasn't the case at all.
Dr. Ekberg's weight started at 185 pounds, and after 10 days, this weight was the same.
He went on to note that he 'didn't exercise a whole lot' during the study, and simply did a few push ups and went on a couple of walks.
Meanwhile, his glucose started at 95, which later went down to 84. And his insulin went down to 2.8 from 3.5.
"I might add that an ideal range for insulin is between two and five, whereas a diabetic is going to be more on a range of 25 to 30," Dr. Ekberg went on to say.
Dr. Ekberg also said that while he doesn't recommend people have so much butter in their diets, he wanted to prove a point that the predicted outcome of having so much saturated fat didn't happen to him.