Butter or Margarine?
In January 2010, Shyam Kolkevar, a leading heart surgeon from University College Hospital, London called for butter to be banned in the UK. Concerned about the increasing numbers of patients he was seeing with heart disease in their thirties, he also warned of the dangers of other foods high in saturated fat, advising people to eat less red meat, take low-fat milk and switch to olive and sunflower oil.
He claimed that a ban on butter and replacing it with a ‘healthy margarine’ would save thousands of lives each year. Putting aside concerns about the nanny state micromanaging every aspect of people’s lives, is there any basis for his concerns?
Firstly, it is interesting to note that Mr Kolvekar's comments were issued by KTB, a public relations company that is also employed by Unilever, the maker of Flora margarine. However, any financial links between the consultant and Unilever have been denied.
Various UK television chefs including Clarissa Dickson-Wright have waded into the argument in support of butter. Evidently, Clarissa Dickson-Wright’s godfather made her promise as a young girl never to eat margarine.
This might have been regarded as a rather odd promise to make given the acknowledged competing dangers of recreational drugs, smoking, alcohol and unprotected sex were it not for the fact that her godfather was Rudi Jurgens. He was involved in the early days of margarine creation and production and his family later joined forces with the Van Den Berghs to form Margarine Unie, which later merged with Lever Brothers to become Unilever. So why was he concerned about his goddaughter's consumption of margarine?
Fats: A quick guide
The whole subject of fats is a complex one, and despite media simplification the jury is most definitely still out as to whether there is any link at all between heart disease and fats consumed. In brief, an monounsaturated fat is a fat in which there is one double bond in the fatty acid carbon chain and a polyunsaturated fat has more than one double bond. A saturated fat has no double bonds because all its carbon 'arms' (bonds) are fully saturated with hydrogen atoms. However, all foods contain a mixture of fats with the predominant fat often being cited. The fat composition of butter, margarine and light margarine are shown below in grams per 100 g.
|
FOODSTUFF |
SATURATED |
MONOUNSATURATED |
POLYUNSATURATED |
|
Butter, pack |
63 |
29 |
3 |
|
Margarine, tub |
16 |
33 |
49 |
|
Light margarine, tub |
19 |
46 |
33 |
Composition of butter and margarine
Trans-fats
Whilst trans-fats can occur naturally in meat and dairy products, these forms are not thought to be dangerous. However, in the modern diet, trans-fats are most often created by the processing and heating of oils and fats which twists molecules out of shape - although the body will still use them as it would naturally-occurring fats. These fats were created to produce a cheap substitute for butter that prolonged the shelf-life of food. Margarine, vegetable shortening and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are found in thousands of processed and fast foods such as cakes and biscuits (cookies), crisps (chips), margarine and ready meals.
Evidence has been growing about the dangers of trans-fats since the 1990s. The increasing use of these fats has been implicated in rising rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and other degenerative diseases. They have also been linked to lower birth weight babies and declining fertility. The use of these artificially created trans-fats has already been banned in Denmark, Switzerland and Austria as well as the American states of New York and California.
According to Professor Alan Maryon-Davis, President of the UK Faculty of Public Health, trans-fats have no nutritional value and he was quoted as saying: "Trans-fats are much less well known than saturated fats but are much more damaging. They contribute to a large number of the excess coronary deaths we have in this country."
Compare and contrast: The manufacture of butter and margarine
The manufacture of butter
Milk is left to stand and the cream is collected and allowed to sour slightly so that acids which break down the fat in the cream form. The cream is then churned until it forms butter, leaving a watery buttermilk behind. This is then poured off and the butter worked with cold water to remove the last of the buttermilk. Next, it is salted and packaged for sale. That’s it! That is how butter has been made for ten thousand years.
The manufacture of margarine
I vividly recall visiting a margarine factory on a school trip 35 or so years ago. I remember the industrialisation of the whole process, but I also still recall the noxious smell of the raw ingredients!
First manufacturers start with cheap, poor quality vegetable oils such as corn, cottonseed, soy, safflower or rapeseed (Canola). These oils (excluding safflower) are among the the most genetically modified crops and to extract the oil usually requires the application of high temperatures and pressures which result in oxidation of the oils creating trans-fats.
Cottonseed oil is most often used and contains a natural toxin, gossypol, which is removed during refining. It also contains several hundred omega-6 fatty acid molecules for every omega 3 fatty acid molecule, where a healthy ratio is believed to be 1:1. Rapeseed or canola oil has also been linked to vitamin E deficiency and growth retardation and so is not allowed to be used in the manufacture of infant formula.
Sometimes hexane can be used to chemically extract the last fraction of these oils and although subsequently removed, traces of it will inevitably remain.
The raw oils are then steam cleaned thus destroying all the vitamins and antioxidants. They are then mixed with finely ground nickel, which is a highly toxic substance that acts as a catalyst during the hydrogenation process. The oils are then put under high temperature and pressure in a reactor with hydrogen gas and this process forces the hydrogen into the oil molecules.
Fully hydrogenated fats are inedible solids whereas partially hydrogenated oils are semi-solid and edible. At this stage of manufacture, the partially hydrogenated fats are a lumpy, smelly, grey grease to which emulsifiers are then added.
This grease is further steam cleaned under high temperature and pressure to remove the noxious smell and then bleached to remove the grey coloration. Finally, synthetic vitamins and artificial flavours are added along with a natural yellow colorant to make the product more appealing to the customer.
The relative merits of butter and margarine
According to Udo Erasmus, an expert on oils and fats, butter:
-
Is natural and easy to digest
-
Is low in essential fatty acids
-
Contains relatively large amounts of some fatty acids which interfere with the functions of essential fatty acids
-
Contains cholesterol (not proven whether this is an issue)
-
May contain pesticides and antibiotics (if not organic)
-
Contains 3 - 6% trans fatty acids but these are less harmful than those found in margarine and many even be beneficial
-
Is suitable for frying, baking and heating and stable when exposed to heat, light and oxygen
And margarine:
-
Is artificial and hard to digest
-
Has a high content of non-essential fatty acids which interfere with the functions of essential fatty acids
-
Contains no cholesterol
-
Concentrates pesticides 2 to 5 times more than vegetable oils
-
Has had the minerals and vitamins needed for fat metabolism refined out
-
May contain less pesticides than butter
-
Contains no antibiotics
-
Contains dozens of other non-natural chemicals produced during hydrogenation, the effects of which are not totally known
-
Is not suitable for frying because the polyunsaturated fats present are further damaged by heat, light and oxygen
-
Is advertised in misleading ways as high in polyunsaturated fats when some of these polyunsaturated fats are actually harmful
-
Is unstable in that the water present in margarine slowly destroys the double bonds in the fatty acid chains producing altered fats which may be harmful
At the end of the day, you will have to decide for yourself whether you side with butter or margarine. However, I think to blame a natural product that has been eaten for thousands of years for the advent of a recent problem is patent nonsense.
Butter is still the better choice even for many of those people who are intolerant of dairy products, because it is all fat and contains little of the proteins that usually cause digestive mayhem.
Further resources
For books on the topic of diet, see under Natural Recovery in the Recommended Reading section.
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