People looking for a good way to extend their lives may want to consider their butter consumption. Most of us eat around six-and-a-half pounds — 25 sticks — of butter a year.

That's good news for dairy farmers but not such good news for our health, as a recent study by a team from Mass General Brigham Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute of MIT shows.

The research points to a simple solution: if you swap butter for plant-based oils, especially soybean, canola or olive oil, you'll likely have a lower risk of premature death.

“What's surprising is the magnitude of the association that we found — we saw a 17% lower risk of death when we modeled swapping butter with plant-based oils in daily diet. That is a pretty huge effect on health.”

The team analyzed the diets of over 221,000 participants included in the Nurses' Health Study (NSH), Nurses' Health Study II (NHSII) and Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS). Every four years, these volunteers answered questions about how often they consumed certain types of food. Then the researchers used this data to estimate how much butter and plant oils were eaten.

There was a striking connection they discovered between butter-eating and mortality. “What's surprising is the magnitude of the association that we found — we saw a 17% lower risk of death when we modeled swapping butter with plant-based oils in daily diet. That is a pretty huge effect on health,” the study's lead author Yu Zhang, research assistant at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in a press release. Zhang is also a student in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

What's the big difference between butter and oil? The types of fatty acids that are contained in them. While butter is rich in saturated fats, plant-based oils have more unsaturated fatty acids. For their study, the scientists included butter from butter and margarine blends, spreadable butter added to food and bread, and butter used in baking and frying at home. The intake of plant-based oils was estimated based on the reported use in frying, sauteing, baking and in salad dressing.

The researchers noted that participants who ate the most butter had a 15 percent higher risk of dying than those who ate the least. In contrast, those who ate the most plant-based oils had a 16% lower risk of death than those who ate the least.

“People might want to consider that a simple dietary swap — replacing butter with soybean or olive oil — can lead to significant long-term health benefits,” Daniel Wang, an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School and an associate member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in a press release.

“From a public health perspective, this is a substantial number of deaths from cancer or from other chronic diseases that could be prevented,” Wang, who is also affiliated with the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, added.

By cutting back on butter and incorporating plant-based oils into your daily diet, you can create meaningful, long-term health benefits.

The takeaway is clear: Butter is not all bad, but by cutting back on butter and incorporating plant-based oils into your daily diet, you can create meaningful, long-term health benefits.

The authors point out one limitation to their study: Since all the participants were health professionals, they might not represent the U.S. population as a whole. In the future, they hope to study the biological mechanisms that underly why this dietary change has such a large impact.

Meanwhile, if you're convinced making the switch from butter is worth it, you have a lot of options. These are the top plant-based substitutes for butter:

  • Olive oil
  • Sunflower oil
  • Avocado oil
  • Walnut oil
  • Peanut oil
  • Sesame oil
  • Flaxseed oil
  • Canola oil

The study is published in JAMA Internal Medicine.