Margarine is really WHITE and then dyed yellow to look like butter.
Margarine is made from vegetable fats and oils. Plastic is made from petroleum. If there’s only one molecule difference, then a lot of stuff you eat is only one molecule away from being plastic.
I’ll leave the nutritional analysis to someone else – but I notice the list fails to mention that butter has cholesterol and margarine doesn’t.
Isn’t that obvious from the hysterical tone, the vague statements, the complete lack of references for any of these alleged ‘facts’?
Just looking at the labels on margarine & butter in my refrigerator shows that the first one (" Both have the same amount of calories.") is clearly false.
Margarine can be made from various vegetable oils. And so, the color will vary depending on the vegetable. Margarine made from corn is a bright yellow color, maybe even more so than butter. But I can’t think of any vegetables that are mainly black.
Growing up in the midwest dairy states in the 1960’s, I can clearly remember margarine coming with a separate coloring package. That was a legal requirement, and corn farmers complained that the law required corn margarine, which was naturally yellow, be bleached white and then packaged with a yellow coloring agent. But dairy farmers thought that was a good thing.
As far as “one molecule away from plastic”, that is so scientifically vague as to be a pretty meaningless statement. I put fertilizer with Phosporus to my lawn to make it grow better, but that is “one molecule away” from arsenic, a deadly poison.
I guess the real question comes down to which one of trans fats or cholesterol is worse for you, since those seem to be the main unhealthy components (besides butter/margarine being 80% fat!).
pulykamell 's snopes link pretty much says it all. The most recent science can’t really say that any of it is too safe in huge quantities. TFA’s do seem to block arteries better than their cis- cousins and cholesterol is bad for you. Margarine doesn’t rot or mold…but neither does butter, both have too much fat and not enough available water for microbial growth. Microbes like water and fermentable carbohydrates, neither of which are abundant in butter or margarine.
They will both go rancid. Lipid molecules react with oxygen radicals making icky smelling and tasting compounds that <insert dramatic music here> are chemically close to plastics :gasp! the horror!:
Incedentally…you actually can make plastic out of milk. Plastic is a very general term, that describes a physical charachteristic… plastic definitions
I have also heard that you can overheat vegetable oil and make a decent furniture varnish…but I cannot tell you more.
Indeed; water is ‘but one molecule away’ from the deadly nerve gas called Sarin - if you removed the H[sub]2[/sub]O molecules and simply replaced them with molecules of (CH[sub]3[/sub])[sub]2[/sub]N-P(=O)(-CN)(-OC[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]5[/sub]), we’d all be DEAD!
bump the jury is still out on that one…it probably depends on family history, diet, exercise, etc. I’m sure they’ll get back to us in a few decades. High cholesterol in the fam’…I’d go margarine, a couple bypasses already…go butter…or oil. I can’t suggest eating large quantities of either.
Also, while most margine is high in trans fats, which does raise your heart attack risk, you can get brands that much less trans fat.
They are often labeled as no trans fat per serving, but that’s a bit sketchy, because if the amount is less than 0.5 g they are alllowed to round down to zero.
While there a certain amount of cholesterol is permitted in a healthy diet, in 2002 a panel at the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine concluded that there is no safe level of trans fatty acids in the diet, and that they should be avoided where possible.
Nah, I’ve never seen that (although I’ve heard my mother talk about it), and I’m not a kid any more. I don’t think that Ontario law even requires that margarine be dyed a different shade of yellow than butter any more, but I can’t swear to that.
Unquestionably trans fats are worse to eat than cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol **does not ** have that great a bearing on blood cholesterol levels, as most of the cholesterol in your blood is manufactured in the body anyway. One of the biggest misconceptions out there about butter seems to be that eating cholesterol = high blood cholesterol. Well, maybe slightly, but the effect is minimal.
(Cite)
As a chemist I would rather double the amount of cholesterol in my diet than increase the amount of trans fats by 10%.
FWIW I use butter rather than margarine for most uses. When spreadability is an issue I use olive-oil margarine that has virtually no trans fat.
As to the original email, parts of it are true or at least based in truth. Other parts, as noted above, are cobblers. What I do know is that hydrogenated fats, made using nickel catalysts, are packed with trans bonds and very bad news indeed for your arteries.
Your blood cholesterol level is affected more by eating meat than eating food with a high cholesterol level, since meat induces your body to make more cholesterol. Unless you have hypercholesteremia, you are better off eating sat fats vs trans fats, if you had to make a choice. Fortunately, you don’t have to choose between butter and margarine when there are several unsaturated oils available. I also use olive oil in place of either butter or margarine for everything, including on my baked potato.
Canada banned margarine entirely until 1948 (later in some provinces) to protect the dairy industry. New Zealand also forbade margarine production.
In German towns over 5000, buyers had to enter shops by a separate entrance or go to a partitioned off area of the shop to buy margarine.
While imitation butter was first known as “butterine” in Britain and the U.S., both countries banned the use of any variation of “butter” in the name.
In 1902 in the U.S., margarine became classified as a “harmful drug” and stores had to be licensed to sell it.
Sales of golden margarine was not legally banned, but subject to a heavy tax, although five states demanded that it be dyed pink. Tubes, bags or tablets with yellow dyes had to be kneaded into the white margarine, leaving the final product often streaky and unpalatable.
Hydrogenated vegetable oil became the main raw material by the 1920s and yellow oils were available to make a naturally yellow product and get around the tax. The dairy industry managed to get a yellow oil tax passed in 1931 and in 1934 any kind of unbleached oil was made illegal.
Oleomargarine became just margarine in the U.S. in 1950.
In this 1987 book she, a Canadian, claims that “the law still prevents margarine from looking like butter in Ontario” although it was permissible to dye it a darker yellow than butter.
Is this law still in effect? Because there’s a brand of margarine called “I can’t believe it’s not butter”.
As to the benefits of margarine, I only know of three: It keeps longer, it’s cheaper, and the recipe can be varied for various reasons (it’s possible to make a low-fat margarine, but not a low-fat butter, for instance). Healthwise, there’s not much difference between them: They’re both pure lipid.
