Prof Sarah Berry is an expert on nutrition (Image: Zoe)
It’s one of those questions that most people think they know the answer to – which is healthier out of margarine and butter. However, in a recent podcast, food scientists have spoken about changes in how margarine is made – and also some worrying health statistics.
Appearing on a podcast Sarah Berry Professor of Nutritional Sciences at King’s College London and the Chief Scientist at the health and nutrition company ZOE explained the latest thinking – and what the differences between the two are.
Margarine was invented in 1869 when Napoleon called for the development of a low-cost alternative to butter to feed his troops for less money, Zoe CEO Jonathan Wolf explained. Hippolite Mège-Mouriès used animal fat and milk to create the first ever margarine.
That changed in 1902 when a German scientist developed a process to harden oils using a method called hydrogenation. This process turns a liquid oil, like canola oil or soybean oil, into a hard fat, like margarine.
Prof Berry explained: “It’s a chemical process that changes the unsaturated fatty acids in the seed oil to a saturated fatty acid. And what this does is change the chemical structure of the oil, but increases the melting point or more plainly, makes it a harder fat.”
On the other hand butter is made by churning milk – the fat molecules clump together, and after a lot of this hard churning, you are left with a solid lump of butter and then a very low fat liquid at the bottom called buttermilk, Prof Berry said.
She said: “Butter is what we would call a saturated rich fat, so about 60 to 70% of the fatty acids in butter are saturated. Unlike the margarines, which have about 70% unsaturated fatty acids.”
Recent figures have shown that since the 1990 margarine consumption started to dip quite sharply and in the USA butter has once again been the most popular option, which Dr Berry said was ‘largely to do with people being concerned about the types of fats that were in margarine.’
Margarine changes
Mr Wolf said it appears that margarine should be considered ‘ultra processed’ food. But Prof Berry said: “We need to first look at how the manufacturing of margarine has changed over the last few decades. ‘cause this is where I think there’s a lot of misconceptions that we first need to clear up before we look at how margarine is made today. This is most notably regarding the presence of trans fats in how they were historically made.”
Mr Wolf said: “If I remember correctly, the takeaway is that trans fats are really, really, really, really bad for you.” Dr Berry replied: “In 2007, the World Health Organisation put forward a global proposal to reduce these industrially produced trans fats. In fact, trans fats were actually removed from most foods in the UK and the US way before 2007. I think it’s this fear of trans fats in margarines that probably explains this dip that you talked about in the popularity of margarine that we saw in the 1990s.”#
Relative healthiness of margarine and butter.
Prof Berry said it was hard to compare because the results many studies on health which may have started 40 years ago are tainted by the fact that the production methods of margarine have changed dramatically. She said: “So if I was to look at these studies 30, 40 years ago, it would very clearly show, well, margarines are so bad first because they’ve got all these trans fats.”
On butter she said: “We know firstly, is that if you are consuming butter at quite normal level, so not to excess, and we follow you over many numbers of years, it seems to have a very small impact on your health outcome. If you are consuming large amounts, so for example, in Finland, they used to consume up to about 45 grams per day, and that’s huge. But in Finland, people consume about 45 grams on average, and many consuming even more than that a day. Now, in that situation, we saw that rates of heart attacks, strokes, for example, cardiovascular disease were really high, and it was partly attributed to the fact that they have lots of butter in their diet, but they also have lots of other healthy unhealthy components in their diet.”
“If it’s at the level of intake that you know, most people in the UK and the US might consume by just spreading it, for example, on their sandwiches are on their toast, then the evidence at that level shows that it’s unlikely to have actually any significant long-term unfavorable effect at that low level of intake.”
She said people may be surprised at the impact of spreads. She said: “What we do know though, is that if you were to swap from having butter to the kind of spreads that are out there today, these highly unsaturated fat spreads that contain no trans, that actually you will get a reduction in circulating blood cholesterol, so you’ll get a reduction in this bad LDL cholesterol.”
But she said that because the new spread creation methods are recent, not enough research has yet been done for a definitive answer. She said that often she uses olive oil instead on bread as a proven healthy alternative. Prof Berry added: “I think Extra Virgin Olive oil, without a doubt, is the healthiest fat or oil that anyone could consume. But it takes us back to that point about functionality that we talked about earlier. I don’t want to be putting extra virgin olive oil on my toast or my bagel in the morning. I want that lovely, creamy texture. Now, personally, I go for butter because of the creamy texture, the richness of it. If I had high cholesterol, I would probably still have butter just on my toast, but I would avoid using butter, in other kinds of cooking.”
