Are we better off with butter? Elsie may get the last laugh.
Plunk a plump, steaming baked potato in front of Harvard nutritionist Frank Hu, give him a choice between butter and stick margarine to put on it, and he’ll pick the butter for health reasons.
Swell. Fifty years after we began forsaking tangy, sweet, creamy butter for pasty, gooey, flavorless margarine in order to stay healthier and live longer, it turns out that we’ve actually been making things worse?
Probably so, says Hu. His opinion is based on a 14-year study of 80,082 nurses, which he helped conduct for the Harvard School of Public Health.
But don’t get Hu wrong. He wouldn’t put a pat of butter on that potato unless it was his only option besides stick margarine. Tub or liquid margarine would be a more healthful choice than butter, he says, and you would be far better off with a discreet drizzle of olive oil or canola oil
Still, isn’t it exasperating? Yet again, science has reversed itself, churning out another study that blithely says: “Remember the good advice we’ve been giving you for the past few decades? Never mind.”
Hu shrugs. “The scientific process is not a once-and-for-all thing. It’s always evolving.”
Swell.
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In the case of butter, Hu explains, health experts had long assumed that because margarine was made from unsaturated vegetable products such as soybean, corn or canola oil, it was better for our hearts than animal-based, saturated-fat-packed butter.
It turns out that partial hydrogenation, the very process that turns those liquid vegetable oils into solid margarines, creates trans fats, which, ounce for ounce, are worse for us than the saturated fat in butter.
Here’s the comparison made in the Harvard study, which was published in November: Replacing 5 percent of the energy we get from saturated fat with energy from unsaturated liquid oils would cut our heart attack risk by 42 percent. But replacing just 2 percent of the energy we get from trans fat would cut the risk by 53 percent.
So the study came to the somewhat startling conclusion that cutting the total amount of fat we eat is less important than fine-tuning the kinds of fat. While it’s still important to reduce the amount of saturated fats we take in from meat, cheese and butter, it’s even more important to cut our consumption of the trans fats found in the firmer forms of margarine and in many processed foods.
The folks who make margarine, not surprisingly, are less than thrilled with the Harvard study. They say it unfairly focused on old-fashioned stick margarine, the kind that predominated years ago. Margarine has mended its ways, says Sue Taylor, registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers.
First, she says, only 40 percent of the margarine on supermarket shelves is the stick variety, with the other 60 percent made up of tub or liquid margarines. Scientists agree that, in general, the softer the margarine, the lower its percentage of partially hydrogenated oils and thus the lower the amount of trans fats.
Second, Taylor says, even what looks like old-fashioned stick margarine is more healthful than it was 10 years ago.
“The old stick really doesn’t exist any more,” she says. “Even when it looks like sticks, it has less fat than in the ’70s.”
In fact, she says, the average fat content of all margarines has dropped from 80 percent in 1980 to 56 percent today.
You can see this by reading labels. Regular Land o’ Lakes margarine lists its first two ingredients as liquid soybean oil and partially hydrogenated soybean oil and has 11 grams of fat per tablespoon. Promise Light, which lists water as its first ingredient and is thickened into stick form by gelatin, has only 6 grams of fat per tablespoon. In fact, by sharply reducing its content of partially hydrogenated oil, Promise Light is free of trans fats as well, as are some other new margarines.
True, says Hu, but there’s still enough trans fat even in today’s broad range of margarines to create problems. The nurses he studied consumed some of their trans fats in modern spreads and baked products well into the 1990s.
Some people say there are two other big problems with margarine: flavor and cooking performance.
Even Taylor takes little issue with the flavor gripe.
“It’s typical across the whole food category, not just margarines,” she says. “People are spoiled by soft drinks. You can have a diet soft drink and it tastes as good as the regular ones. But sodas have about two ingredients. Fats are very complicated.”
Still, she says, many people are perfectly satisfied with the flavors of margarine spreads, especially once they get used to them.
The second problem: cooking. Regular margarine can be used like butter for spreading, frying and baking. Softer margarines have less oil and fat, substituting gelatins, gums, rice starches or even water, so they boil away when you fry or don’t provide enough fat when you bake. The lower the percentage of oil, the more limited the use.
Check the labels before cooking with the new margarines, says Taylor. Margarines with more than 80 percent oil can be used for spreading, frying and baking. Between 50 and 80 percent, they can be used for spreads and in more limited ways for cooking. Below 50 percent, they’re only for spreading.
But make sure it’s the oil content you check, she says, and not just the form of the margarine. Some soft-tub margarines still have 70 percent oil; some sticks are as low as 40 percent.
Taylor urges cooks to experiment with softer margarines.