Why You Should Love Butter — and Bin That ‘Healthy’ Spread

Butter was always better, in every way

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Why do we keep doing this to ourselves — replacing naturally delicious foods like butter with synthetic, inferior substitutes in the misguided belief that they are better for us?

It’s a slippery slope

Margarine was invented in 1869 by a French food chemist called Hippolyte Mège-Mouriés in response to the offer of a prize from Louis Napoleon III to anyone who could make a cheap substitute for pricey butter, to feed the lower classes and the armed forces. Mège-Mouriés’s concoction was a far cry from margarine today, being made from beef suet, ground-up sheep’s stomach and chopped cows’ udder.

Still, it was a lot more wholesome than the margarines and spreads on offer today.

It seemed a good idea at the time: vegetable oils could be made hard like butter just by adding hydrogen atoms, and to do so was cheaper than using beef suet. The partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils, a process that creates trans fatty acids, has serious implications for human health, in particular cardiovascular health, mainly because of the way trans fats increase platelet aggregation (clumping of proteins in blood). This can lead to clots. So dangerous are these trans fats that many countries have banned the use of hydrogenation and partial hydrogenation in food processing.

A total ban came into effect in the US in 2018. In the EU, it’s up to the individual country. The UK still has no such ban in place, even though:

“The UK government is being urged to completely wipe out industrially-produced trans fats from the food chain after the World Health Organization warned they kill up to half a million people around the world every year.” (Telegraph)

Since the general public got wind of the harmful trans fats that are created during the hydrogenation process, most processed food manufacturers have voluntarily ended this practice. Instead, they use a process called interesterification, which involves the deployment of enzymes to treat vegetable oil at high temperatures to make it more solid.

Is interesterification safe? We don’t know, because few studies have investigated its safety, and those that have suggest that the process may have potentially adverse effects on fat metabolism and blood sugar control. So a possibly hazardous procedure is carried out on a staple food consumed by millions every day, and has never been adequately tested for safety.

Have we learned nothing?

It seems not.

Margarines and spreads are usually produced from omega-6 polyunsaturated oils (sunflower seed, soya bean, corn) but may also be made from monounsaturated oils such as olive oil.

These once-natural oils are processed to within an inch of their lives, in a series of high temperature refinements, that involve degumming, bleaching and deodorisation.

The effect of the deodorisation process is to create trans fatty acids, albeit in smaller amounts than the process of hydrogenation. That’s right — those trans fatty acids we thought we had seen the back of have returned through the back door. Because these trans fats are produced only during the refinement of the oil, there is no legal requirement for them to appear on the list of ingredients.

At this stage, both the flavour and colour of margarine are somewhat unpalatable, so the product has to be “corrected”. Flavourings and colour are added, to make it look and taste more like butter. Vitamins A and D are added to compensate for the absence of those nutrients and as a statutory requirement.

Does the end-product even taste like butter? For the love of God, that is the least we should expect after all that effort. But of course it doesn’t. UK readers of a certain age may remember that in the 60s and 70s, television adverts featured housewives in a supermarket, uniformly astonished to discover that they couldn’t tell the difference between Stork margarine and butter.

Nobody was convinced. Yet instead of sliding into obscurity — a fate it surely deserved — margarine evolved into The Spread.

A spread is a margarine spin-off, containing less fat and more water.

The composition of margarine is defined by law under The Spreadable Fats (Marketing Standards) Regulations, 1995. Margarine must have a fat content of not less than 80 per cent but less than 90 per cent. A spread contains less fat, usually 25%-75%. In the absence of fat, it is bulked out with water. It’s a watery vegetable oil, for which people happily pay a premium.

What about healthy olive oil spreads?

The olive oil used in these spreads has undergone the same refinement process as other vegetable oils. It is a world apart from the cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil so beloved of the people of Mediterranean countries. What’s more, these spreads are usually blended with other refined oils, such as sunflower and canola.

I Can’t Believe Butter Does All This

Pure butter is an entirely natural product, and even more so when made from the milk of free-range, pasture-fed dairy cows. It is true that some natural foods, notably butter, contain some trans fatty acids, but these have different chemical structures to their industrially produced counterparts and are not alien to the human body. It is the artificial trans fats created during the hydrogenation and refinement processes that are no longer “Generally Recognized as Safe,” by the US FDA.

Made from soured, churned cream, butter contains health-promoting fatty acids, in particular butyric acid, from which butter takes its name. Butyric acid is also created via the fermentation of fibre by bacteria in the gut. It regulates colon immunity and reduces inflammation in the gut. It helps the friendly bacteria L. acidophilus and B. bifidum to stick to the digestive tract and resist harmful bugs that might attempt to take up residence. Butyric acid is known to block colon tumour cells and at the same time promote healthy colon cells.

Butter is a rich source of another fatty acid called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). CLA is known to slow down and even prevent tumour development, and is the only fatty acid acknowledged by the National Academy of Sciences in the US to show consistent anti-tumour properties, even at very low levels. Furthermore,

“CLA decreases body fat storage in animal models and promotes cardiovascular protection against atherosclerosis.”

Butter is the gift that keeps on giving, clearly. It is also naturally rich in vitamin A, unlike spreads and margarine, which have to be artificially fortified with this vitamin.

But, you’re thinking, isn’t butter full of saturated fat, and doesn’t saturated fat kill off people in droves?

In 2015, the British Medical Journal published a systematic review and meta-analysis of the research, and found no association between saturated fat consumption and coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes or indeed all-cause mortality. Similarly, a review published in 2017 examined the evidence for the dietary guidelines issued in 1977 in the US and in 1983 in the UK, recommending that total fat and saturated fat consumption should be reduced to 30 per cent and 10 per cent respectively, of total energy intake. The conclusion was that the evidence was ‘found lacking.’

In the meantime, I recommend that you purchase a stoneware butter dish. Then you can dispense with the fridge on summer days and enjoy your own spreadable, heavenly-tasting, health-giving butter.

This article was first published on Medium in July 2019