September 2011 - Butter or margarine?
A couple of people have recently asked me whether they should choose butter or margarine. Whenever I write about this topic, I get angry letters from those who sell both, but here goes.
For the record, I don’t eat margarine – and never will, but I cannot advise those with high blood cholesterol to eat butter. My abhorrence of margarine is longstanding and dates back to the days when I went to a factory and saw the stuff being made. (For similar reasons, I would never eat so-called ‘shoulder ham’, but that’s another story.)
Let’s compare the yellow spreads.
Taste?
Butter wins this contest easily. A big pat of butter was once added to vegetables to encourage children to eat them. It worked, although a much healthier option is to follow the example of people in Mediterranean countries who use olive oil and herbs to make vegies more enticing.
Baking?
Butter is the product of choice for baking as its flavour comes through in pastries, cakes and biscuits. Few professional chefs will use a shortening other than butter – mainly because it tastes so much better than margarines.
Naturalness?
Butter wins this one hands down. Australian butter is not coloured and needs no preservatives or other additives. The only permitted additive to Australian butter is salt. Unsalted butter is also widely available and is the preferred spread in most European countries as well as being favoured by chefs and for many applications in baking. Australian butter is yellow because our cows live outside eating green grass containing a high quantity of natural yellow-coloured pigments. In parts of Europe where cows are kept indoors in winter and fed dried material, which has very little of the natural pigments, butter is paler in colour. Cows that are grain-fed in the United States also produce paler milk and pale butter.
Margarine was originally made from animal fats churned with milk and salted for flavour. At first, it was not permitted to be coloured and this curtailed its use. Some hard margarines are still made from animal fats but most table margarines are now made from processed vegetable oils. The processing includes de-gumming the oils, treatment with a strong alkali, washing, drying, bleaching, filtering, deodorising and steaming to produce an colourless, odourless and tasteless oil. The oil is then hardened to form a spread. Some countries use a process called partial hydrogenation. This produces a nasty trans fat and this method is no longer used in Australia. Much of the material that circulates on the Internet assumes this process is still used. Australian producers use a different process that converts just enough of the oil's unsaturated fat into saturated fat to produce a spread. They then add whey, water, emulsifiers, salt, colouring and vitamins A and D.
Health?
Both butter and margarine are approximately 80% fat. Butter has about 60g of saturated fat/100g. In margarine, the saturated fat content varies, usually from 18-30g/100g. Some margarines now contain 70% fat and are legally obliged to be called a ‘spread’ rather than margarine, Manufacturers are generally happy about this.
Butter contains a high content of pre-formed vitamin A (also called retinol) plus small quantities of vitamins D and E, and iodine.
Butter also contains some ready-made cholesterol, but this is insignificant compared with the cholesterol in foods such as lean meat. For example, 10g of butter contains 14mg cholesterol whereas a piece of lean grilled steak has about 130mg. Neither is a real problem because most excess cholesterol is made in the body. A high intake of saturated fat encourages the body to make more cholesterol, so this is the real problem with butter.
Some reduced-fat spreads have 50 per cent fat and extra water, often with milk powder and more emulsifiers added. Vitamins A, E and D are added to margarines with some products having a slightly greater content of vitamin E than butter, but less vitamin A.
Olive oil margarines are made from a mixture of oils, usually including at least 50 per cent canola oil. Apart from the monounsaturated fat, they do not retain the beneficial components found in extra virgin olive oil.
Plant-sterol enriched spreads
Spreads with added phytosterols (or plant sterols) are also available. The phytosterols are derived from soy beans and they prevent cholesterol being absorbed from the small intestine into the bloodstream. They are usually labelled as ‘reducing cholesterol absorption’ because it is illegal to make a health claim that a food will reduce blood cholesterol.
Short term studies show that phytosterols can reduce cholesterol levels by 8-10 per cent. Unfortunately, phytosterols also reduce the absorption of other valuable protective components of foods, including vitamin E and some carotenoids found in fruits and vegetables. CSIRO has found that eating an extra serving of fruit and vegetables each day can make up for the losses caused by the phytosterols. Unfortunately, few people eat even the recommended quantities of fruit and vegetables, let alone an extra serving.
Five hectares (12.5 acres) of soy beans are needed to produce 1 kilogram of plant sterols and while the rest of the soy bean can be used for animal fodder, this seems to me like a poor use of land, fertiliser and water. And these products are still margarine.
The take home message
With my bias against margarine, but because I can’t ignore the high saturated fat of butter, my solution is to use olive oil for cooking and on vegetables and salads and try not to eat too much butter. A freshly made sandwich doesn’t need any kind of ‘yellow grease’.