The Charaka Samhita, the foremost Ayurvedic text, states in sutra 27, verse 232, “out of all the oils fit for human consumption, ghee is the best to eat.” Let’s see why this is so.
Ghee is clarified butter that has been used in India for thousands of years. It is made from unsalted butter, simmered over low heat until the water evaporates leaving behind the milk solids. These solids float to the top and are skimmed off or strained out leaving behind the clarified liquid fat known as ghee.
Ghee is an excellent source of the fat-soluble vitamins — Vitamins A, D, E and K. It is also loaded with many other vitamins, antioxidants and healthy fats.
Ghee helps us to absorb nutrients into our cells. Here’s how it works: Whatever food we eat can’t help us at all until the food is broken down in our digestive tract into small enough particles which can cross through a very delicate cell membrane to gain entrance into our cells. Our cell membranes separate the inside of all the cells in our bodies from the outside environment, both protecting the cell and allowing nutrients to pass into the cell and toxic substance to pass out of the cell.
The cell membrane has been called the most important organelle for the cell because it is responsible for determining what goes in and out of the cells. You see, outside the cell are important nutrients that the cell needs to survive, but on the other hand there are also dangerous acids and other compounds that are toxic to the cell that must be kept out. So they have this very important job and serve as gatekeepers which allow some molecules to flow through, but not others.
The cell membrane is very flexible which allows for rapidly growing and dividing cells, but at the same time it is also a formidable barrier, allowing some substances to pass through while blocking others.
Now here’s the important thing:
All the cell membranes in our body are made of cholesterol, which gives the membranes a consistency kind of like that of a light oil. Fat-soluble molecules can pass through the membrane so ghee actually becomes a tremendous vehicle to transport the nutrients we eat across this fatty cell wall — the ghee actually slides the nutrients right on through into the inside of the cell.
In fact, ghee works so well at delivering nutrients into the cells it is used in many Ayurvedic herbal formulas which are cooked in ghee and consumed as a paste. It’s always amazing to me how the ancient doctors knew to cook so many of the herbs into ghee formulas even before we had microscopes to figure out why ghee would deliver these important nutrients into the insides of our cells.
And, by the way, this also means that cooking with ghee in your diet will enhance the absorption of the nutrients from the foods we eat into your cells.
Many people I see from India report to me that they no longer eat ghee because it contains cholesterol. Then they proceed to tell me they deep fry or use high heat in cooking and they cook with ground nut oil or peanut oil, mustard oil, sunflower oil, and canola oil. And then in the next breath they tell me they just had stents put in for their clogged arteries. Even though they are vegetarian and there’s nothing in their diet that would otherwise clog their arteries.
Except for these vegetable and seed oils! When you heat them they form a plastic which clogs the arteries. They also form a poison which when swallowed, damages the liver, giving rise to diabetes, and India has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world.
When you heat oils to a high temperature they oxidize and form very dangerous compounds. So everyone is now looking for an oil that has a high smoking point which won’t oxidize when heated to a high temperature. Which is why everyone is switching to using avocado and coconut oil. But these oils are very heavy and waxy, cold and hard to digest. Unless you live near the equator where there is more heat from the sun providing you with a stronger digestive fire, then you should not eat these oils as they are too heavy.
Ghee, on the other hand, is the easiest oil to digest and yet has the highest smoking point (485 degrees!) of any oil.
So here’s the thing:
Many patients are shocked to find out that when they eat ghee their cholesterol actually goes down! This happens because ghee contains high concentrations of monounsaturated Omega-3s. These beneficial fats also keep the arteries clean and prevent heart attacks. In fact, the nutrients in ghee actually prevent any sticky plaque from attaching to the walls of the arteries.
And you may have heard that ghee contains conjugated linoleic acid or CLA. CLA helps to burn fat and build muscle mass, which is why many people lose weight when they include ghee in their diets. This is also why body builders take CLA tablets, but CLA supplements do not provide the same benefits as CLA from food because they are the synthetic version made in a lab and are therefore lacking nature’s healing vibration, known as prana. Even modern medicine has proven this point: studies show that the synthetic version of CLA has a different mixture of isomers than what naturally occurs from getting the real thing from food, thus providing less of a benefit. And make sure your ghee is from grass-fed cows since this will contain higher amounts of CLA as well as other beneficial fats.
CLA also prevents inflammation in the artery walls and hardening of the arteries, both of which can cause heart attacks.
And one of the things ghee is most famous for is that it contains butyric acid, also known as butyrate. So what is butyrate and why is it so important?
Well, it plays a huge role in the health of our gut health. The gut lining is basically two layers — a mucus layer with friendly bacteria growing in it. This thick gloopy mucus layer is made by the goblet cells embedded in our gut wall. They are programmed to make mucus 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It is important too have a very thick layer of mucus to prevent pathogens from going through. This is known as a mucus barrier, and it’s basically a shield that cannot be penetrated by pathogens. There are specialized friendly bacteria which make butyrate and it is this butyrate which tells our goblet cells to keep pumping out mucus.
Unfortunately we can’t make butyrate, but instead we rely on the friendly gut bacteria to make it for us. These friendly gut bacteria use fiber to make butyrate which in turn pumps out goblet cells to make mucus. Butyrate is found in only a few foods, and, you guessed it…one of them is ghee. It’s also found in butter and raw milk.
The gut also consists of tight junctions that hold together the colonocytes or the cells of the intestines. And butyrate works on our gut lining to keep the tight junctions intact so that large molecules of food don’t escape which could cause the immune system to attack and create food allergies, inflammation or even an autoimmune condition. Loosening of these tight junctions is known as leaky gut, which is now rampant in our society, and eating ghee in the diet is an excellent way of healing the leaky gut.
So now you can see how important butyrate is for your health and why ghee is considered extremely important for gut health, keeping the lining of the gut intact so the friendly bacteria can grow, keeping the mucus layer nice and thick and keeping the tight junctions intact.
As we speak there are numerous studies being done to see the benefits of butyrate in treating inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. So fat the results look very promising.
It’s always been amazing to me how time and again, the ancient doctors predicted so many things that we are now proving true with modern research. Thousands of years ago they declared that women would become highly fertile if they ate ghee and children would be highly intelligent.
And this turned out to be true! The female hormones which make you fertile are made out of cholesterol and ghee provides this highly absorbable and nourishing form of cholesterol to crank up a women’s hormones. And the brain uses cholesterol to function, thus making our children highly intelligent.
I have helped so many women conceive babies who were infertile and were avoiding whole milk and ghee in their diets, mainly because they were told that cholesterol clogs the arteries so they were eating a low fat diet. When we switched them back to ghee and warm milk their fertility shot right back up.
Now, for those of you who are not familiar with ghee you can either make it yourself from unsalted butter from grass-fed cows. Just melt the butter, let it come to a low simmer and skim off the dairy solids as they rise to the top. After about a half hour, depending on how much butter you are using, you will notice that you can see through the butter, that it becomes clear, and it makes a crackling sound. At this point you can strain it through cheesecloth into a pyrex bowl or jar and keep it at room temperature.
There is a second, more complicated way to make ghee, but this ghee is the more traditional way of making ghee and it has even more health benefits than regular ghee, which is already amazingly good for you. This is known as cultured ghee and is made by taking heavy cream, adding a yogurt culture to it overnight and turning it into yogurt, cooling it down for a day in the refrigerator then churning it into butter, then making ghee from that cultured butter.
This ghee is much easier to digest than regular ghee since the friendly bacteria in the yogurt cultures break the fats down into even smaller particles for better absorption. And this ghee has twice the amount of CLA than regular ghee.
You can use ghee the same way you use butter — saute spices and vegetables with it, use it on top of vegetables and grains, and you can bake with it as well, since it can withstand the high temperatures.
I hope that you decide to incorporate ghee into your diet to keep your gut healthy, your arteries clean, your brain intact into old age and to keep your weight down. It’s a shame more people don’t know about the amazing health benefits of ghee. Think of it as one of nature’s gifts to us, and probably one of the most important foods in your diet.
Thank you.