Can Butter Coffee Help with Weight Loss and Mental Acuity?

Butter coffee also known as Bulletproof coffee, is a growing trend that is being promoting to assist with weight loss and provides major benefits towards mental acuity and focus.

With butter now not being as bad for you further to new clinical studies, consuming it within reason is seen as a good thing for your health.

Most original Desi diets do contain butter as part of the fats used for making dishes. So, using butter in your coffee, perhaps will not be seen as a strange concoction.

In fact, tea made with almond oil is a well-known Desi drink for mental acuity. Also, there are butter tea recipes from India which are based on Tibetan tea, the inspiration for butter coffee.

Bulletproof coffee or butter coffee has grown in popularity with many drinking it as a great way of helping with weight loss and improving mental sharpness.

How is it made?

Butter coffee, as the name suggests, has two main ingredients – butter and coffee. There is also a third, which is medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) oil, this is a type of fat originating in coconut and palm oils.

The innovator of this drink is Dave Asprey. He spent many years perfecting the right level of ingredients to try and match the benefits he realised you could get from yak-butter tea when he was in Tibet.

Dave reveals how he felt drinking the Tibetan tea: “I had so much more energy, and I didn’t feel sick at the altitude at all. I realized: there’s something going on here. I just felt so good.”

By 2009, Dave created the right blend of ingredients for his Bulletproof coffee recipe, which contains:

• two cups of high-quality coffee produced from a single origin
• about two tablespoons of unsalted grass-fed butter
• one or two tablespoons of the MCT oil

Now, most of you will think this seems like a lot of fat and therefore a lot of calories. Yes, that is true. The drink can range between 310-850 calories depending on how much butter and MCT oil you add to the butter coffee. In fact, Dave likes to add up to six tablespoons of butter to his drink.

However, by doing so, Dave found that drinking Bulletproof coffee in the morning and not eating breakfast, helped him lose 100 pounds.

Dave went onto creating a business around Bulletproof coffee, with the same named brand, which sells specially produced coffee and MCT oils for the drink, if you want to make Bulletproof coffee exactly as he does.

Alternatively, using good quality, organic, low-mycotoxin coffee is acceptable too for this drink.

The quality of the butter is important. It must be made from grass-fed cows and not contain any other ingredients. Kerrygold unsalted butter is one brand known for being grass-fed and most popular for this drink.

With regards to the MCT oil, you can get specially formulated ones on the market for this coffee drink. However, the main ingredient for the MCT is coconut oil. So, most people simply use high quality organic coconut oil.

It is also important not to add cow’s milk, nut milk, honey, or sugar in your drink according to Dave. He says, you can mix in additions such as cinnamon, coconut cream, or Stevia but try to not “wreck the effects” of your drink. Therefore, drinking it in its basic three-ingredient form is really the best way.

Making butter coffee in the blender is the better way to make it compared to just stirring the butter and oils into the coffee with a spoon.

You may find some variations of butter coffee too, including ketoproof coffee and some recipes even use grass-fed ghee too.

Here is a video showing you how to make butter coffee:

How does it work?

Normal coffee drinking spikes energy levels. With butter coffee this spike is said to be slowed down. Therefore, making the drinkers of this type of coffee feel fuller for longer. Some reports say it can curb appetites for as long as six hours.

The notion of drinking butter in a coffee drink and it helping lose weight seems to be a strange mix for many to believe. But there is a science to this.

The discovery says it is related to how your liver functions during the digestion process. Basically, both the butter and MCT oil kick-start your liver to slowly start work on breaking down the medium-chain triglycerides. The MCT’s are burnt as fuel instead of being stored as fat.

With this slow breakdown activity of the liver, the coffee to takes longer to process in your system too. Therefore, the caffeine provides you with a much more delayed and smoother lift.

Another added value is that coconut oil helps your body produce of high-density lipoprotein (HDL), also known as the ‘good’ cholesterol.

Some studies, have found that MCT consumption can help with modest weight loss or weight maintenance.

Most drinking the beverage for breakfast find that hunger does not pounce on you at lunch time. And due to this, it also introduces the desire to eat smaller meals later into the day.

Also, because of the spoons of fat for breakfast, butter coffee drinkers tend to be more aware and wary of any fats and oils they consume during the rest of the day.

Therefore, promoting weight loss.

In addition, the drink is known to improve mental acuity. It has been touted as ‘brain food’ and ‘functional food’.

Other wellness benefits include better skin tone and complexion.

Health experts are also commenting on the benefits of butter coffee.

Jeffrey Gladd M.D. has been experimenting with Dave Asprey’s recipe and says:

“It keeps hunger at bay and has enhanced my mental clarity and sharpness 20 to 25 percent.”

“Jeff believes that a morning dose of almost pure fat may help stimulate the body’s fat-burning potential, leading to easier weight loss,” says his colleague, Dr Andrew Weil.

Dr Weil says:

“Blending a tablespoon or so of high-quality, unsalted, organic butter into your morning coffee or tea is unlikely to do you any harm, and is a worthwhile experiment for the sake of both taste and health if you are inclined to try it.”

New York nutritionist Amy Shapiro, RD, says:

Bulletproof coffee “can be a satisfying, energy-producing breakfast that provides many nutrients, satisfies hunger, and may cause your body to increase fat-burning, resulting in weight loss.”

But she does add a caveat, saying:

Bulletproof coffee “can add a lot of high-fat calories, if the rest of your day doesn’t consist of clean eating.”

Therefore, you must continue with all your healthy eating and exercise habits to ensure you get a return from the new trend, if you try it.

However, like with any health trend, if you have any cardiovascular health issues other heart or weight related illnesses, it is important you first check with your doctor and get a measurement of your cholesterol levels, before embarking on the journey of butter coffee.

What is the taste like?

Once you make butter coffee in the blender, it produces a drink which is like a rich, frothy latte.

They say it is better drinking butter coffee by taste than visually looking at it. Because, you will see small droplets of fat floating in your mug. So do not use your eyes to ‘taste’ the drink say fans of it.

Actually, the droplets are called micelles and are produced when the mixture of the drink is blended at high speed, Therefore, allowing your body to be able to more easily digest the rich beverage.

So, there you have it. The benefits of butter coffee trend for for weight loss and better brain performance.

Now, it is up to you to try the beverage and see if the blended trio of coffee, butter and MCT oil as a breakfast meal, can provide the same benefits for you too.