Yuka says butter is bad. Here is why it is wrong.

If a food app rates real butter “bad” and a diet soda “better,” the problem is the app, not the butter. Scanners like Yuka and labels like Nutri-Score lean hard on saturated fat and sodium as red flags, while rewarding “low-fat” and added fiber. The result is a model that downgrades a simple, ancestral food and upgrades engineered products. The grading reflects an outdated fear of fat, not what the food does to your body.

How Yuka and Nutri-Score actually score

These systems are mostly built around a nutrient checklist, not biology. In practice they:

• Penalize saturated fat heavily, treating it as a near-automatic negative regardless of the food it comes in.
• Penalize sodium, even when it is just salt in a whole food.
• Reward “low-fat” and reduced-calorie products, because less fat means fewer “bad” points.
• Reward added fiber and certain micronutrients, which manufacturers can engineer into processed foods.

Butter is almost pure fat, much of it saturated, with naturally occurring salt in the salted version. Run that through a saturated-fat-and-sodium filter and it scores poorly, almost by definition. The model never really asks what butter delivers. It just counts the things it was told to fear.

The concrete absurdity: butter vs diet soda

Here is where the logic falls apart. A diet soda has no saturated fat, no sugar (it uses sweeteners), and almost no sodium. On a checklist that hunts for fat and sugar, it has very little to flag, so it can land a reassuring grade. A sugary “low-fat” yogurt can score well too, because the fat penalty is gone and a health-coded label does the rest.

Meanwhile butter, a single-ingredient food humans have eaten for thousands of years, gets marked down for being fat.

So you can end up with a screen that nudges you toward a flavored, sweetened, ultra-processed drink and away from plain butter. That is not a nutrition judgment. It is a fat-counting exercise dressed up as one. A scoring system that ranks an engineered beverage above a whole food has lost the plot.

Why this model is scientifically outdated

The saturated-fat penalty traces back to the mid-1900s diet-heart hypothesis: the idea that saturated fat raises cholesterol and therefore causes heart disease. That theory drove decades of low-fat advice and pushed industrial seed oils onto the dinner table in butter’s place.

The problem is that the original case was built on weak and selective data, and treating all saturated fat as one villain ignores the food it lives in. Saturated fat inside a whole food like butter behaves very differently from the refined oils and sugars in an ultra-processed product. (We go deeper on this in why butter is good.)

There is also what the checklist misses entirely. Butter is not “empty” fat:

• Fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K2, in a form your body absorbs well.
• Vitamin K2, which is rare in the modern diet and helps direct calcium toward your bones.
• Butyrate, a short-chain fat linked to gut health.

A grade that ignores all of this, then awards points to a product whose main feature is the absence of fat, is measuring the wrong thing.

What a better score looks like

A useful score does not start by counting fat grams. It starts with a different question: what does this food do to your body? That means weighing:

• Nutrient density, the real vitamins and minerals delivered, not just what is missing.
• Processing, how close the food is to its natural state. A single-ingredient whole food is not the same as an engineered one.
• What it does to hormones and satiety, since real fat is satisfying and stabilizing, while refined products are built to be over-eaten.
• Provenance, because the same food differs by source. Grass-fed butter carries more omega-3, CLA and K2 than conventional.

Score food that way and butter is clearly real food, while many “good grade” products are clearly not.

How Phyziq scores it instead

The Phyziq Food Score grades every food from F to S on what it does to your body: nutrient density, processing, macro quality, glycemic load, sourcing and purity. Saturated fat in a whole food is not an automatic penalty.

So real butter, especially from grass-fed cows, lands high, around an A, because it is minimally processed, nutrient-rich and a genuine fat. Diet sodas, sugary low-fat products and ultra-processed “health” foods fall, because a clean label cannot hide what they actually do. You can scan a food, see its tier, and switch its provenance to watch the score move. (For the full breakdown, see the Food Score method.)

The goal is not to score the absence of fear ingredients. It is to show you what your food does, so the choice is yours, on evidence, not on a decades-old fat scare.

FAQ

Is Yuka useless? No. Scanner apps are genuinely useful for spotting additives, sweeteners and long ingredient lists, and that visibility is valuable. The weak point is the nutrition model behind the grade: a saturated-fat-and-sodium penalty that misjudges whole animal foods. Use it to read ingredients, not as the final word on whether a food is good for you.

Is butter actually healthy? In normal cooking and eating amounts, real butter is a quality fat, not the enemy. It brings fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K2 plus butyrate, and grass-fed butter has a better fat profile again. The old idea that its saturated fat directly causes heart disease has not held up well.

Why does butter score worse than diet soda on these apps? Because the grade reacts mostly to saturated fat and sodium, and a diet soda has almost none of either. The checklist finds little to flag in the soda and a lot to flag in the butter, even though one is engineered and the other is a whole food. It is a flaw in the model, not a real comparison of value.

Does Phyziq just prefer animal foods? No. The Food Score rewards real, nutrient-dense food of any kind and penalizes ultra-processing. Fruit, vegetables, dairy and honey all score on their real merits. Butter scores well because of what it does, not because it is animal-based.