Butter Eating Toddler

[Guest guest]

I read this today in the Mothering Magazing Expert Question Area.

Thought you all might enjoy:

My two-year-old walks around eating a stick of butter. Healthy fats

are always available, e.g., avocado and fats from cold-water fish. Is

there something else his body is craving beyond fat? Something I'm

not realizing that he's seeking in his diet?

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Response:

Butter-eating is seen at times in children. It's good that you have

other good fats available for him. Butter contains a whole host of

valuable fatty acids. The saturated fats and cholesterol are

important to a child's diet as well. These are not unhealthy fats,

though they've been demonized over the last several decades. Butter

is rather unique in its high availability of retinol—let's call it

real vitamin A—whereas vegetables only provide precursors to vitamin

A. People have differing abilities to convert the precursor

carotenoids to vitamin A, and there are rare cases of an inability to

convert. I doubt this is your son's dilemma, though.

He could just enjoy the texture and salty sweetness, and it could

just be a short phase, or he may have a very high metabolism and the

longer-lasting energy of fat may feel comfortingly satisfying for

this reason.

You may never know the real reason for your son's habit, but I would

continue to allow his butter-eating as long as the rest of his diet

is well balanced. It's fine if 50 to 60 percent of his calories are

coming from fats (mother's milk is close to 50 percent). If you

notice a considerable trend of excess weight gain, you'll want to

have him evaluated for any hormonal disorder or enzyme deficiency.

Again, I don't expect to see this.

I would want to be sure that most of the butter consumed is organic.

At some age it'd be nice to see this habit toned down. This will

likely occur without intervention.