Which is better – butter or margarine

One of the real joys of the Hay Diet is that it features natural foods like cream and butter and cuts out highly processed alternatives. Yet we are often told that margarine is better than butter because it has less saturated fat, and saturated fats are bad for us because they clog the arteries and cause heart attacks and strokes.

There are a few problems with this. Firstly, there is no proven link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease or strokes (1,2,3). Secondly, our bodies evolved to digest natural foods from animals and plants and not unnatural foods from factories. Thirdly, most margarines made today contain polyunsaturated fats, which are linked with a suppression of the immune system and with cancer (4,5).

Recent studies in the US have shown that heart disease worsened in those who switched from butter to polyunsaturated margarines. In one study of 85,000 nurses, those who ate four teaspoons of polyunsaturated margarine a day had a sixty-six percent increased risk of heart disease compared to those who ate none.

How butter is made

To make butter milk a cow and let the milk settle. Scoop the cream off the top. (If you don’t have a cow or access to raw milk, start here.) Leave the cream at room temperature a few hours to sour a little. Shake the cream to separate the buttermilk (great for cooking) from the butterfat, and then rinse the butterfat and shake again to remove more of the buttermilk. The solid is called butter.

The ingredients of butter

The ingredients of butter are: milk fat (cream), salt (unless unsalted).

Making butter at home

Here’s a neat video showing you how to make butter at home:

How margarine is made

Margarine is made by first manufacturing oils from animal fats, or more usually these days, from vegetables or seeds, such as safflower, corn or soy beans. (One margarine is even made from tree bark!) To extract the oil at the vegetable oil factory, use a combination of mechanical and chemical means such as hexane solvent extraction. (Hexane is derived from refining crude oil.) Treat the oil with caustic soda (usually made by electrolysis of a salt solution) to remove free fatty acids, and then leave it to dry. (It may or may not be bleached at this stage using charcoal and bleaching earth.)

Take the oil to a margarine factory and subject it to high pressure at temperatures of around 260°C, and force hydrogen (usually made by the steam reforming of methane or natural gas) into the mixture to hydrogenate and harden it. Add catalysts such as nickel oxide (usually made by digging up nickel deposits and heating the nickel powder to over 400°C in the presence of oxygen) to help the process along.

The result is rather smelly, so deodorise it using high temperatures and chemical additives. Then add chemicals to change the colour from the “natural” grey to yellow to make it look less disgusting, and then add chemical flavourings to make it taste a bit like butter.

(There are actually several other processes involved in making margarine that I missed out.)

The ingredients of margarine

The ingredients of margarine may include combinations of the following (depending on the oil used): 3,5,trimethylhexanal, annatto extracts, ascorbyl palmitate, butylated hydroxyanisole, canthaxanthin, curcumin, diacetyltartaric and fatty acid esters of glycerol, disodium guanylate, edible fats, edible oils, mono- and di-glycerides of fat-forming fatty acids, phospholipids, propyl, octyl or dodecyl gallate (or mixtures of them), propylene glycol mono- and di-esters, salt or potassium chloride, skim milk powder, ß-apo-carotenoic acid methyl or ethyl ester, sucrose esters of fatty acids, tartaric acid, tert-butylhydroquinone, tocopherols, vitamins A and D, xanthophylls (5).

So which is better?

At the beginning of the 20th century everyone ate butter, lard and dripping. There was a type of margarine (made from animal fats such as whale blubber), but most ate the real thing. Everyone fried their foods, had delicious bacon and egg for breakfast and toast with lashings of butter. And yet heart disease was almost unknown.

There is nothing wrong with saturated fats (in moderation like everything else), and butter is far better than margarine.

If you want to avoid heart disease and clogged arteries, lose weight if you need to, eat a balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, meat and fish; eat little or no sugar, cut out processed foods, and get moving! Turn off the TV and go for a walk, take the stairs instead of escalators or lifts; walk or cycle to work; go dancing, or get out and do some gardening. Also, stop smoking, and cut alcohol consumption.

References:

(1) Patterns of coronary heart disease mortality over the 20th century in England and Wales: Possible plateaus in the rate of decline http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/8/148

(2) What if bad fat isn’t so bad? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22116724/

(3) Saturated Fat Intake vs Heart Attack and Stroke http://freetheanimal.com/2009/09/saturated-fat-intake-vs-heart-disease-stroke.html

(4) Polyunsaturated Oils Increase Cancer Risk: http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/fats_and_cancer.html

(5) Part 2: Dietary Fats and Heart Disease http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/cholesterol_myth_2.html

(6) Robert Krampf: How to make butter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oropJD0CUxI

(7) MARGARINE: Healthy to eat grey plastic?http://www.stop-trans-fat.com/margarine.html
(8) Butter and margarine: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Butter-and-Margarine.html
(9) Refined vegetable oil: http://www.healthy-eating-politics.com/vegetable-oil.html

Article reprinted with permission from Eating and Health.