There are still many who believe that choosing margarine over butter is better for your health. You may be unpleasantly surprised to discover that margarine is a highly processed trans fat that can triple your risk of heart disease; increase your risk of cancer; lower the quality of breast milk; decrease immunity to disease; and decrease your response to insulin.
What, exactly, is a trans fat? Trans fat, also known as trans fatty acid, is far from healthy, being made from the hydrogenation of oils. Hydrogenation solidifies liquid oils; adding trans fats to oils and foods increases their shelf life and flavor stability.
And you don’t have to look far to find to find this nasty ‘food’ ingredient – it’s included in most margarines and vegetable shortenings as well as in crackers, cookies, snack and other foods.
If that doesn’t make you stand up and pay attention consider this: trans fat is only one molecule away from being a plastic. Furthermore, margarine itself shares 27 ingredients with paint.
Try this experiment if you’re still not convinced – buy a tub of margarine and leave it open in your garbage or sitting outside. Go back and check it in several days. You will find that no flies or insects have dared go near it! Margarine will not rot or decompose because it has absolutely no nutritional value – not even bugs want to mess with it!
Did you know that margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys and other farm animals, but after it actually sickened the animals, they had to stop using it? Researchers who invested money into the production and manufacturing of this product wanted payback, so they put their heads together to figure out what else they could do with it.
Being a tasteless white substance with no real food appeal, they decided to add some yellow coloring and flavoring and offer it as a food as a substitute for butter. With enough help from advertisers, butter became “bad” for you, and margarine was promoted as the better alternative.
Both butter and margarine have the same amount of calories (9 calories per gram), and butter is slightly higher in saturated fat content. Furthermore, eating butter actually helps with the absorption of nutrients in other foods. Butter also has more natural nutritional benefits and tastes so much better than margarine.
And, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study, eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter.
Please believe me, butter is better, so go ahead and enjoy it. And the next time you are tempted to use margarine, ask yourself if you would spread a melted plastic food container on your toast.
