Food 101.3 - Butter and Margarine... for the last time

I made the radio last night.  When I was in my car about 5 minutes from home, the DJ was talking about how she only had butter in her house because it was natural and she felt like it was better for her and her family than margarine.  Trans fats be damned, I'm going back to natural.  I sped home the rest of the way and wrote in - couldn't find the station number.  The DJ talked about my email on the air.  Nothing too exciting, but at least I got the message out.

This is such a hot button issue for me.  The whole natural thing.  If you look at any food on a molecular level EVERYTHING - from butter to margarine to sugar to aspartame - looks like a bunch of scary chemicals.  And it's very hard to tell them apart.  Now I'm not - and have never claimed to be - a nutritionist.  That's not my bag.  But, I can look at a food's molecular structure and get some sort of idea of its properties and how it will behave in the body.  In fact, hell, I won't use sucralose (or Splenda) because it's chlorinated sugar.  I don't believe that I need to be consuming chlorine on a regular basis.  That is a complete gut feel that is not backed up by any human study data - it just gives me the skeeves.

Long story short, I'm not going to judge anyone for making the food choices that they do.  You're putting it in your (and your family's) bodies, and that is one of our most basic human rights.  What I want to try to avoid is the general population being afraid of the food they eat or otherwise making unnecessary or incorrect choices based on some half truths.

So here we go.  A few years ago, the FDA had gathered some very conclusive data that trans fats are bad for you.  Walk down a busy street and ask anyone about trans fats, they'll tell you the same.  The world has gotten the message - hallelujah!  Except... it seems we can only remember a few food-related health facts in our brains at once.  So now, everyone has seemed to have de-throned Saturated Fat as the major evil-doer and has put Trans Fat in its place as Public Enemy #1.  As such, we as consumers have been making a MASS exodus from things that contain trans fat and have lovingly embraced Saturated Fat once more.  So for once and for all:

Saturated fat is STILL bad for you.  Or rather, trans fats and saturated fats are equally detrimental to your health.

Okay?  Choosing butter over margarine gains you nothing.  Both potentiate heart and other circulatory disease.  Both have the same amount of calories.  Oh and here's a kicker, butter has cholesterol and margarine doesn't!  Plus, nowadays a lot of margarine companies are reformulating to yield little to no trans fats in their finished product, making it much better than butter ever could be.  Well, healthwise anyway - butter is still yummy, from a culinary standpoint of course.  That's an entirely different issue.

The moral of the story is this:  Choose heart healthy oils - like corn oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, or olive oil - when cooking and all will be well as far as your heart is concerned.