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Butter or Margarine?
10/03/2009
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Article Provided by Seventh Wave Supplements - the UK's totally natural and additive free supplements company
This week has seen the launch of a Government campaign to get us eating less saturated fat. It is said that on average, most people eat 20% more than they should.
It’s an important issue, and the TV campaign is hard hitting.
Butter is targeted as a food to cut down. And if we pop over to the Government website, what do we see as the key image - butter.
Certainly, too much butter is never a good thing, but is margarine really a healthy replacement?
Let’s take a closer look at the facts.
Butter is completely natural. Yes, it is a saturated fat from animal sources, but it is unadulterated, and packed with nutrients that can make quite some contribution to overall health and vitality.
Margarine is man made. And it is one of the most chemically processed and refined substances to be found in the modern kitchen. At the beginning of the 20th Century, the American Government considered margarine an “an injurious product” and as such, it was heavily taxed; certainly pressure from the dairy industry was part of the restriction of margarine sales, but rightly so! In Canada, margarine was banned until 1948. In Australia, yellow margarine was banned until the 60s, and in Ontario, it was illegal to sell butter coloured margarine until 1995.
Years have passed, and today, margarine is on (most) people’s shopping lists.
In the name of convenience, margarine is hydrogenated which means it spreads quickly and easily. Plant fats are pumped with hydrogen, creating trans fats, known to generate high levels of free radicals in your body. Trans fats have a far more negative impact on your body than natural, saturated fats do.
So what about the “healthy” margarines?
Today, some margarines are free from trans fats, or “virtually” free from trans fats. It would be easy to think then that these margarines are preferable to butter. And claims abound about for example cholesterol reduction and heart health benefits. But a closer look at the processes involved in creating margarine is revealing.
The only additive allowed in butter is salt. (It is always best to choose unsalted butter, as lets not forget that the salt used will always be highly refined salt, not real salt packed with vitamins and minerals)
Margarine however contains a huge array of additives in addition to the plant fats (which are extracted with solvents). Colours, emulsifiers, synthetic vitamins, whey, flavours, stabilisers and preservatives to name just a few. Everything is blended together, heat treated, pasteurised and more. Yes, it spreads easily, and yes, it may even taste “buttery”, and even contain healthy plant sterols as the ad men like to tell us, but margarine has no place on the plates of the health conscious.
Margarine is actually just a few molecules away from being plastic. It is toxic to your cells, and despite the clever advertising, is not a healthy option.
The Nutritional Benefits of Butter
Your body needs some saturated fats, they support the immune system and provide you with energy.
Butter (as does coconut oil) contains unique short and medium-chain fatty acids. These play a special role in your body to fight pathogenic organisms in the gut and protect you from disease. Lauric acid (medium chain) boosts your metabolism. Butter also (naturally) contains vitamins A and D both of which have far reaching health benefits, as well as many trace elements and other beneficial substances.
And although butter is generally considered to be fattening, the calories from medium chain fatty acids are actually burnt much quicker than those found in long chain fatty acids such as olive oil. They give quick energy and are not stored in the adipose tissues. Human fat tissue is however affected by long chain fatty acids as found in polyunstaturated fats and refined carbohydrates.
The Wulzen or "anti-stiffness" factor is a nutrient unique to butter. In 1943, Dutch researcher Rosalind Wulzen found that feeding any animal a low fat diet resulted in arthritic tendencies, but that these can be reversed when raw butter fat is reintroduced
If you are lucky enough to be able to obtain raw butter from your local farm, this actually has surprising health benefits (See Ancient Dietary Wisdomfor more on this).
Moderation is of course key.
What About The Other Fats?
Monounsaturated fats can be found in natural foods including nuts, avocados as well as olive oil, grapeseed oil, ground nut oil, peanut oil and sesame oil. Using one or more of these occasionally in your cooking during the week will provide adequate amounts
Polyunsaturated fats fall into two groups - Omega-3 (linolenic acid) and Omega-6 (linoleic acid), and can be found in Flaxseed Oil, Cod Liver Oil, Evening Primrose Oil and Borage Oil. Eating 3g weekly, or 0.45g daily, long chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids makes a vital contribution to overall health and vitality. Polyunsaturated fatty acids cannot be made in the body, and therefore need to be included in your diet, these are known as Essential Fatty Acids, and are often referred to as the “Good Fats”.
But What About the Evidence on Saturated Fats?
We don’t have to go back very far to find evidence of diets extremely high in saturated fats, and yet a low incidence of heart disease. Even today, we can find groups of people with high fat diets, and still a low incidence of heart disease, obesity and other conditions usually associated with saturated fats.
The rise in these problems actually goes hand in hand with the growth in the usage of processed vegetable oils. Scientific literature has never shown that reducing saturated fats actually reduces morbidity rates.
If we look to America, we can see some revealing statistics. At the beginning of the 20th Century, heart disease was extremely rare. In just the forty years between 1920 - 60, it became the biggest single cause of death. And yet, in this very same time period, butter consumption went from an average of 18lbs per person a year to 4lbs. Clearly then, butter was never to blame.
In the 60s, a study in India found heart disease was fifteen times higher in South India compared to the North, yet in the North, they consumed nine times more saturated fat. In the tribes in Africa such as the Masai, whose entire diet is milk and animal meat, heart disease is unknown. Likewise traditional Eskimos are free of the disease, that is until they adopt a Western diet, and then it starts to present itself
In 1965 The British Medical Journal published a study that looked at people who had suffered a heart attack. One group consumed corn oil, one olive oil, and the third saturated fats. After two years, the group eating saturated fats had by far the greatest % of people remaining alive – 75% compared to 57% for the olive oil group, and 52% in the corn group.
The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) European Coronary Prevention Study found no relationship between saturated fats and heart disease, this was published in 1983. Shortly after, following 50 years of research, a report published in 1997 concluded
"Intakes of fat and type of fat were not related to the incidence of the combined outcome of all cardiovascular diseases or to total or cardiovascular mortality"
So, our advice when it comes to saturated fats…
Certainly, the nation needs to address its eating habits, eliminate hydrogenated fats and reduce the excessive intake of saturated fats, but we must be careful not to take a scientific theory with little evidence too far.
When it comes to what to put on your toast, without question, butter is best.
Read all of your food labels carefully, and eliminate anything that says "partially hydrogenated", "hydrogenated" or even "low in trans fats. Basically, all processed foods should be eliminated as far as possible.
Everything in moderation, including your fats, but don’t look to reduce saturated fats drastically. Instead, keep it healthy, if you eat meat, grill rather than fry. Cut out those cakes and biscuits, not only are they high on fats (and generally the wrong types), but are also laded with sugar. Enjoy cheese in moderation
And as ever, pack in the fruit and vegetables for balance and harmony in your diet.
References
The Fourfold Path to Healing – Thomas Cowan
Price, Weston, DDS Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, 1945, Price Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, Inc., La Mesa, California
Rose G.A., Thomson W.B., Williams R.T. “Corn oil in treatment of ischaemic heart disease,” British Medical Journal 1965;1:1531-3.
Malhotra SL. (1967). Serum lipids, dietary factors and ischemic heart disease. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 20; 462-74
Shaffer RD, Mann GV, Anderson RS, Sandstead HH. (1963). Heart disease among the milk and meat-eating Masai of Tanganyika. Proceedings of the International Congress on Nutrition. 6th, Edinburgh 1; 616
Gillman MW, Cupples LA, Millen BE, Ellison RC, Wolf PA. (1997). Inverse association of dietary fat with development of ischemic stroke in men. Journal of the American Medical Association 278; 2145-50 |
 Margarine Timeline
1813 - Michel Eugène Chevreul discovered "margaric acid" a fatty acid
1869 - Emperor Louis Napoleon III wanted a butter substitute for the lower classes and the military, and offered a reward to the first to invent it
1873 - French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriés invented oleomargarine by clarifying vegetable fat, removing the liquid then allowing it to solidify.
1874 - United States Dairy Co. New York, buys the Mege-Mouries patent and began to manufacture margarine, they called it "artificial butter"
1886 - Margarine banned in Canada
1877 - United States pass legislation restricting the sale of margarine, restricting labelling claims, and requiring manufacturers to hold a license to make and sell margarine
1902 - United States pass legislation restricting the sale of yellow margarine, bootleg margarine became common, and some companies sold colouring capsules so consumers could colour their own margarine
1903 - Hydrogenation of oils process is invented by Normann
1948 - Canada lifts the margarine ban
1950 - federal Margarine Act was signed by President Truman margarine taxes and licenses were lifted
1967 - Wisconsin, United States, the last state to do so, lifts restrictions on margarine
1960s - Australia lifts the ban on coloured margarine
1994 - EU legislation prohibits the use of the word butter on margarine products (and so it is today we have "Utterly Buttery" and others that change the word enough to escape the legislation
July 2008 - Quebec lifts the ban on yellow |
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