I commented on Davis' original post, so I'm going to allow myself the indulgence of quoting myself:
First, that very paper says that only
about 10% of exogenous AGEs actually
make it into circulation, so that
automatically takes butter down to
26.5KU/g. Of course if a patient has advanced kidney failure then worry
about exogenous AGEs should be a
concern, but so should protein,
potassium etc etc.
Secondly, the focus on exogenous AGEs
in this table is obviously one-sided.
Saying that butter contains more AGEs
than a bowl of fructose, ignores the
fact that once inside the body, the
carbohydrate will cause immeasurably
more glycation than the fat. These
researchers are quite obviously
pushing an lipophobic agenda here and
I wouldn't fall for it.
Third, it's not just butter,
apparently, but olive oil is also
120KU/ml or about 900 times more than
an apple. But it would surely be
absurb to think that apples will
glycate less then olive oil?
Fourtly, there something extremely
suspect about the fact that whole milk
contains 5300 times less AGE than
butter. This should make us think
twice before thinking that there's
something uniquely bad about dairy fat
that this study has discovered.
So the findings about butter (and olive oil) are highly dubious.
On the exogenous AGE controversy, it is certainly plausible that exogenous AGE intake is biologically significant, even though it's a small portion of overall AGEs for people on a normal diet. Fwiw, I do treat high-temperature cooked meats as probably less healthy than gently cooked equivalents and do prefer offal to muscle meat (which also produces fewer AGEs) and like to throw as many herbs and spices onto my meat as possible (although technically this might only refers to HCAs not AGEs) for the same reason, but it certainly doesn't seem that this is a major factor in overall health. A high AGE diet might well fall into category of paleo but non-optimal.
