Wild Foods
Have you ever put butter in your coffee?
Serious question. (Trust me, it's delicious.)
Butter in coffee is great.
And it's growing in popularity, so much so that you can find butter coffee on the menu in many Whole Foods now.
Part of the reason it is growing in popularity in the states is the connection between drinking a butter coffee and fasting (skipping breakfast).
Adding butter to your coffee (and MCT oil) is a great way to skip breakfast in the mornings while still getting a boost in energy from fat calories while still getting the effects of fasting.
Without going deep into intermittent fasting, try the following: skip eating whole food and try coffee and/or butter coffee instead. Then eat later in the day whenever you feel hungry, ideally 4-8 hours after waking.
Below is our recipe—The Wild Butter Brew—but before we get to that, I want to talk about fat for a hot minute.
After all, the mass of people still believes that fat is unhealthy.
::Sigh::
In short, fat is not bad for you.
In fact, fat is an essential nutrient for humans.
Essential nutrients mean, if you don't eat it, you'll die.
How can something that we have to eat to live, be "bad" for us?
Well here's a perfect example of something that's counter-intuitive for a reason: because it's counter to intuition... or in other words, it's wrong!
All that being said, the kind of fat matters. Fats that are highly processed and that come from seeds—canola, soy, etc.—are what you want to stay away from.
Fats that come from animals—grass-fed beef, fatty fish, wild game—are not only ideal but the most nutritionally packed foods on the planet.
This article is supposed to be about butter coffee so I won't expand on the topic of fat anymore. Read the Wild Foods Guide To Fat for the full skinny on fat.
“Butter was demonized and replaced with margarine, one of the most supremely stupid nutritional swap-outs in recent memory. Only much later did we discover that the supposedly healthier margarine was laden with trans fats, a really bad kind of fat created by using a kind of turkey baster to inject hydrogen atoms into a liquid (unsaturated) fat, making it more solid and giving it longer shelf life. (Any time you read “partially hydrogenated oil” or “hydrogenated oil” in a list of ingredients, that means the food in question contains trans fats.) Unlike saturated fats from whole foods such as butter, trans fats (at least the manmade kind) actually do increase the risk for heart disease and strokes!”
-Jonny Bowden, The Great Cholesterol Myth: Why Lowering Your Cholesterol Won't Prevent Heart Disease-and the Statin-Free Plan That Will
Butter coffee is a delicious and nutritious way to start your day. You can use it to fast in the morning and skip whole food or you can add it to whatever you already do in the mornings.
Personally, a mug of Wild Butter Coffee is all I have in the mornings. This keeps me going for 4-8 hours before my first meal. (To learn more about intermittent fasting, check out Leangains.com.)
(Tools)
With so many options there is only one thing left to do, sip and enjoy!
