Published August 6, 2025 12:53PM
Why a Self-Professed Health Nut Packs Butter on Every Hike
I was a nutrition snob. Then I learned how to meld pleasure with practicality in my backpacking food stash.
(Photo: Lew Robertson/Getty Images)
I spent two decades as an editor at Men’s Health magazine, dispensing health advice to 20 million readers around the world. Then I wrote a NYT bestseller about intermittent fasting, which starved me down to a steady 150 pounds. I was a paragon of good eating and sensible swaps. Out with potato chips, in with celery sticks. Or, frequently, nothing at all.
Then two things happened. I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, where I learned why restaurant food tastes so damn good: Butter is the first into the pan before cooking, and the last thing into your entree before it hits the plate. Instant five stars.
While I was raising my eyebrows over Bourdain, my son volunteered for a week of trail maintenance with the Appalachian Mountain Club. His crew chief melted dollops of butter into the hot chocolate at night, to ensure that his workers would have the energy to swamp-hog log bridges into place around Lonesome Lake Hut. My offspring had a rebellious gleam in his eye when he shared this nutrition tweak with his health-editor pop—like a preacher’s kid sneaking a smoke out behind the church.
And he was right.
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As a health editor and backpacker, I knew the stats: A guy my size hoisting a 50-pound pack up thousands of feet in elevation, over an 8-mile day, would burn nearly 3,000 calories, according to the Backcountry Foodie calculator. A stick of butter has 800 calories, and every last one of them is delicious, as Bourdain knew.
So on my next 10th Mountain Hut trip in Colorado, I swapped out cooking oil for butter. My Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese reached new heights. Even instant oatmeal became instant awesome. The sticks were stable in my food sack, especially in the cool temps of 8,000 feet, but you can always mash them into a Nalgene or squeeze them into a tube. When mealtime comes, butter can be “first in, last out” a la Bourdain, enriching your morning coffee, savorying-up your freeze-dried meal, and turning your cocoa into an evening benediction.
Better yet, it will then fuel you through hard parts of tomorrow’s hike. A posting on the Ironman website explains why: Our bodies prefer to burn fat as fuel; that’s why it stores fat in the most embarrassing places. So when you’re engaged in slower activities—the long slog to the next food cache, for instance—your body oxidizes (burns) fat to see you through. When you spot a mountain lion, you burn glucose (that Snickers bar) as a flight/fight reaction, and hightail it over the ridge. Then, once you calm down, you’re back to fat for the long haul. Apropos of that, a thru-hiker on the Continental Divide Trail advised eating a stick of it every day; she’d gnaw it down like a carrot.
But this isn’t just a calories-in stratagem.
I’m not 100 percent at home in the mountains. I’m grouchy about my sleeping pad, and pissed off about late night piss odysseys in the chill of night. So I try to add touches of comfort to my days outdoors. And butter’s weight-to-wonderfulness ratio is sky high. If you’re ounce-obsessed, you can even buy it in powdered form. In the heat of summer you can carry shelf-stable ghee (clarified butter) and not worry about creating a grease slick on your sleeping bag.
If you’re worried about your own weight, relax. Butter actually has decent nutritional numbers, especially if you’re humping it in the backcountry, where the burn is a foregone conclusion. A tablespoon has 102 calories, and eleven grams of fat (mostly the healthy kind), plus shots of vitamins A, D, E, and B12. It’s like a Swiss Army knife in your food kit, prepping you for anything. So if you’re looking for a superfood to fuel your days and warm your nights, you can’t do better than butter.
