Bulletproof Coffee Has a Trademark and a Dietitian's Verdict. Brazil's Version Has Neither.

Brazilian coverage of "cafe de rica," literally "rich woman's coffee," describes a recipe: coffee blended with butter, coconut oil or MCT (medium chain triglycerides), linked in the press to Anitta and to Kourtney Kardashian specifically, not the Kardashian family as a whole, which multiple entertainment outlets have documented drinking a butter coffee for years. What the recipe write ups tend not to say is that the drink already has a name, a trademark, a company, and, in at least one market, a formal verdict from a dietitians' professional body. None of that travels with the version circulating on social media.

A recipe with an owner

The drink usually called "bulletproof coffee" was formulated by Dave Asprey, a technology entrepreneur who has said the idea came from yak butter tea he drank while trekking in Tibet in the early 2000s. He published the recipe, coffee blended with unsalted grass fed butter and a fractionated coconut oil, on his blog in 2009, then built a company around it: Bulletproof 360, Inc., founded in 2013, followed by Bulletproof Nutrition in 2014. The company states on its own site that its coffee beans and its "Brain Octane" oil are trademarked products. "Bulletproof Coffee" is not a generic description in its market of origin; it is a brand name attached to a specific company's ingredients, sold alongside a book, "The Bulletproof Diet," and a chain of cafes that opened starting in Santa Monica in 2015.

What the fat substitution actually claims

That distinction matters for a claim embedded in the wire itself: that butter, coconut oil and MCT function as interchangeable fat sources in the recipe. Asprey's own company does not treat them that way. Coconut oil is roughly 13 to 15 percent medium chain triglycerides by fat content, and the specific fraction the company markets as most active, caprylic acid, or C8, makes up only about 6 percent of coconut oil on its own account. Bulletproof sells a distilled C8 oil it says raises ketone levels more than four times as effectively as plain coconut oil, a manufacturer's claim, not an independently verified one, but one that establishes the company's own position: swapping coconut oil for MCT oil is not a like for like substitution, whatever the viral recipe implies by listing them as options.

What the research supports, and what it does not

Caffeine's effect on alertness is well established science, not specific to this drink. What is contested is the added claim, that combining caffeine with these fats produces prolonged satiety, sharper focus or weight loss. Systematic reviews of MCT oil, published in nutrition journals through 2024, do find an association between MCT intake and reduced short term food intake compared with long chain fats, and some report modest weight loss, on the order of half a kilogram over an average ten week period in an earlier 2015 meta-analysis. But the researchers behind these reviews flag the underlying trials as small, heterogeneous and, in several cases, of questionable quality. None of the reviews test the coffee based version of the recipe specifically, and none isolate what caffeine plus fat does that caffeine or fat do separately. The evidence supports a modest, contested effect from MCT oil in general; it does not support the specific promise, energy, prolonged satiety, concentration and weight loss together, attached to this drink online.

Where a professional body has actually ruled

Britain is the one market in this comparison where a nutrition professional body has issued a public verdict naming this exact drink. The British Dietetic Association placed the "Bulletproof Diet," built around the coffee, third on its annual list of celebrity diets to avoid, published in December 2015. Sian Porter, a consultant dietitian and BDA spokesperson, gave the association's verdict: "While the idea of minimising alcohol and processed food is positive, the classification of foods is at odds with health recommendations and lacks evidence." The BDA's specific objection to the coffee itself was nutritional density: a standard serving, one mug of coffee with two tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of MCT or coconut oil, runs to roughly 400 calories from a single beverage, calories the association said would be better spent on food with actual nutrient content.

The saturated fat math behind that objection is worth stating plainly, because it is where the two English speaking markets in this comparison diverge from each other in guidance, not just from Brazil. Britain's National Health Service caps saturated fat at no more than 30 grams a day for an average man and 20 grams for an average woman. Two tablespoons of butter alone can put a single cup of this coffee close to, or over, a full day's allowance under that guidance. The American Heart Association sets a stricter ceiling: no more than roughly 13 grams of saturated fat a day on a 2,000 calorie diet, a little under one tablespoon of butter, and it recommends replacing butter with plant oils rather than adding more of it. Both bodies are describing the same two tablespoons of butter. Neither treats it as a rounding error.

What has not been said, in this market

No equivalent named verdict from a Brazilian professional nutrition body on this specific drink turned up in the reporting for this piece. Brazil's Conselho Federal de Nutricionistas has published general warnings about ketogenic style eating, citing risks like disrupted cholesterol and strain on the liver and kidneys with prolonged use, but those statements do not name butter coffee, and nothing found here shows the council has weighed in on it directly, the way Britain's dietetic association named the exact drink in a public ranking. That is not evidence the drink is safer or riskier in Brazil; it is an absence. The Brazilian coverage that exists, including the nutrologist quoted in the wire that prompted this piece, has taken the shape of one practitioner's individual assessment offered to a reporter, not a professional body's published position. Readers comparing the two markets are comparing different kinds of source, not just different verdicts.

What is established, then, sits in a narrower band than either the celebrity framing or the panic framing suggests. Caffeine wakes people up; that is not in dispute. A modest, inconsistent MCT effect on short term fullness shows up across several trials, though not trials of this specific drink. The company that popularized the recipe treats its ingredients as proprietary and non interchangeable, which cuts against how the recipe is now being distributed as a loose formula of butter, coconut oil or MCT. And one market's dietitians have gone on record calling the underlying diet's food classifications unsupported by evidence, in a ruling that predates this year's celebrity attention by a decade. None of that settles whether the drink is worth making. It does establish what a claim like "cafe de rica" is resting on when it crosses into a new market: a trademark it does not mention, a substitution its own inventor would not make, and, in at least one country, a verdict already on the record.

Sources: NHS · American Heart Association · Bulletproof · Clinical Nutrition