← What's That Rash?
What's That Rash?
Butter vs margarine: what's better for you?
00:21:54
The battle between butter and margarine has been happening since margarine was invented in the 19th century. So have we figured out which one is better for your health – butter with its high saturated fat content, or margarine which is an ultra-processed food? Norman and Tegan unpack the winding history of this debate from its inception to the present day. References: The Butter Wars: When Margarine Was Pink – National Geographic The Butter-Margarine Controversy - 1946 What the margarine vs butter argument says about nutrition – University of Melbourne Dietary fats - Healthdirect What’s better, butter or margarine? - Diabetes Australia Serum cholesterol response to replacing butter with a new trans-free margarine in hypercholesterolemic subjects Individual Cholesterol Variation in Response to a Margarine- or Butter-Based Diet: A Study in Families Effects of margarines and butter consumption on lipid profiles, inflammation markers and lipid transfer to HDL particles in free-li...
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- [00:04]
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- [00:31]
Belinda Smith
Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
- [00:38]
Norman Swan
Robin Williams here. I've been bringing you the science show for 50 years. Somehow.
- [00:43]
Belinda Smith
And I'm Belinda Smith, the host of Lab Notes, the brand new sister show that gives you the latest discoveries in under 15 minutes.
- [00:50]
Norman Swan
Between us, we love all of science, old and new.
- [00:53]
Belinda Smith
So whether you've got an hour or just a quarter of one, we've got science covered.
- [00:58]
Norman Swan
To hear us search for the science.
- [01:00]
Belinda Smith
Show where you'll find both Lab Notes and Science Show. Go check it out. So, Norman, I would like to know what your relationship was to margarine growing up.
- [01:10]
Norman Swan
My relationship with margarine? Well, margarine, we didn't have much money when I was growing up, so we mostly had margarine rather than butter.
- [01:18]
Belinda Smith
We ate margarine in my house growing up, but it wasn't because it was cheaper, it was because it was seen as being healthier. Like I remember reading Matilda by Ryle Dahl and there's this line in there where she's horrified to see her favourite teacher serving margarine cause it's proof that she's poor. But I think in my house growing up, it was all about cholesterol fears. So it's definitely had some ups and downs over the years.
- [01:40]
Norman Swan
Health wasn't a dominant feature of cuisine in my household, but that's a story for another day. You're listening to what's that Rash? The podcast where we answer the health questions that just everybody's asking.
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Belinda Smith
So this week's questions come from. A question comes from both Naomi and Marian. Naomi says, I'm wondering if you could settle the debate on which is healthier, butter or margarine. And Marion says, could you clarify something for me, please? After listening to you talk about fat in dairy products, I've relaxed my habits of reducing my intake of butter and cheese. I thought I heard you say there was something in dairy that did not cause it to increase cholesterol in the body. I believe, says Marion, butter is a far healthier product than the myriad of margarines on the market. Am I correct?
- [02:30]
Norman Swan
Well, let's, as we always do on what's the rash? Go back to basics. What's butter? What's margarine? I'll go with butter. Butter's a very ancient product. Takes about 20 liters of whole milk to produce 1 kilo of butter which is about 88% saturated fat. So it's a mixture of water salts and it comes from churning the cream of cow's milk. It's a solid emulsion. What's margarine? It's kind of the original ultra processed fruit, isn't it?
- [02:57]
Belinda Smith
Well, it is. It's basically in a similar sense to butter. It's an emulsion of fat. But the fat in margarine comes from. Well originally it came from beef tallow. These days it comes usually from vegetable oils.
- [03:09]
Norman Swan
So what's the history of margarine?
- [03:11]
Belinda Smith
Well, I would like to actually talk about the history of butter first because I didn't know. No one really knows where these foods completely originated. But the idea is that butter came from either people on horseback, either Mongols on horseback or nomads on camels backs.
- [03:28]
Norman Swan
Oh, so the jiggling of the milk.
- [03:29]
Belinda Smith
Oh yeah, exactly.
- [03:31]
Norman Swan
Alright.
- [03:32]
Belinda Smith
But it was probably either mare's milk. It might not have been cow's milk originally. Although the word butter actually comes from boss meaning cow. Like it's cow.
- [03:42]
Norman Swan
That must be a terrible disappointment. You're riding all day across the steppe and you're looking forward to a good drink of milk and at the end of it you just squeeze out a bit of butter.
- [03:52]
Belinda Smith
Yeah, you just said it takes 20 liters of milk to get one kilo of butter. I can't imagine how much butter is actually in your water skin or your milk skin.
- [04:01]
Norman Swan
Yeah, your skin.
- [04:02]
Belinda Smith
Skein. Either way it sounds disgusting. Humans really will eat almost anything if they're hungry enough. And that's where most of our foods I think came from.
- [04:10]
Norman Swan
It's a good story.
- [04:12]
Belinda Smith
Margarine we know a little bit more about. Basically what happened is that people loved butter and in the 1800s they had a butter shortage in France because of the Napoleonic wars. And basically there was a prize offered for anyone who could produce a butter substitute because the French Navy wanted fat on their table and they needed something that wasn't going to turn rancid. So this guy called Hippolyte Megay Maurier. If you speak French, feel free to email me.
- [04:38]
Norman Swan
And Critis Hippolyte, if I may say.
- [04:41]
Belinda Smith
So, that rashbc.netw is where you can send your pronunciation concerns. Anyway, he invented margarine, he called it oleo margarine. Cause it was made with beef fat and margarites, meaning pearl in Greek, because it looked like a pearl colour. It's white and shiny.
- [05:02]
Norman Swan
Right. So the goal here was to create something that was spreadable, that looked like butter but didn't go rancid.
- [05:07]
Belinda Smith
Well, yeah, I mean, looking and tasting like butter, I think, was a fairly large stretch at the time. I don't think it probably tasted that similar to butter, but it definitely did the job of lubricating your bread and whatever else you're putting on your bread when you were a hungry soldier out on the front. And so then.
- [05:25]
Norman Swan
Well, just as a spoiler here to come back to the original questions here that we've got, if this was a 19th century podcast, we'd have to say it's not very good for you. Based on murier, it's basically beef tallow.
- [05:40]
Belinda Smith
So, yes, anyway, it was the industrial age. We could make this thing that was a bit like butter. And by the late 19th century, there was 37 different companies manufacturing margarine in the US. So we've moved from Europe over to the US now. And there was a big backlash for. From the butter industry because they saw them as cutting their lunch.
- [06:03]
Norman Swan
That's right. The dairy states thought this was awful and they tried all sorts of things to prejudice margarine sales.
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Belinda Smith
Well, part of the thing was the colour. So like I said, the Marguerite margarine, part of margarine's name comes from the word for pearl. So it was a pearly white colour, maybe a little unappetizing if you're used to yellow butter on your plate.
- [06:23]
Norman Swan
It was basically grey.
- [06:25]
Belinda Smith
Yeah, I mean, gray. But pearls. When you say something's pearl coloured, it sounds nice. When you say something's grey, it sounds awful. Anyway, they wanted to dye it yellow and the butter industry didn't want a bar of that because they said it was too much of a masquerade and they wanted them to have to color it some unsightly color. One proposition was that it should be dyed pink, which I think people maybe have heard of that before, but they never actually kind of managed to get.
- [06:53]
Norman Swan
That through because Supreme Court, for some reason in those days, made rational judgments and said, you know, you can't impose artificial dyes on people.
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Belinda Smith
Yeah. Basically you can't force an adulteration of a food. So they weren't allowed to dye it yellow, but you were allowed to sell it with a packet of yellow food colouring that you could mix in yourself. And so there you go.
- [07:15]
Norman Swan
And here. And here's the thing, of course, Is that a lot of butter naturally is actually white, because it depends on what the cows are feeding on. And some dairy producers will colour the butter a little bit yellow.
- [07:28]
Belinda Smith
Exactly. So there's a little bit of the pot calling the kettle pearl coloured. I don't know. Anyway, what follows the late 19th century spoilers is a really hard few decades for humans in the west. There was the Depression, there was World War II. Margarine became a necessity for people who wanted butter substitutes, cause there were shortages. And then we also had improvements in manufacturing. It really kind of got a foot in, in the market in a way that it may not have if history had unfolded differently.
- [07:58]
Norman Swan
The key here is that you want an oil based product to be solid at room temperature and that requires a fair bit of chemical engineering. And margarine started in the days before it was really known the difference in health benefits or risks between saturated fats and other kinds of fats. So there was no guarantee that margarine in the old days was lower in saturated fats. And then the manufacturing process often produced these highly toxic fats called trans fats.
- [08:28]
Belinda Smith
What is a trans fat? It's one of those things that I see 0% trans fats on packets of things. I thought they were kind of outlawed anyway. What actually is it?
- [08:37]
Norman Swan
Well, they're not outlawed because it's quite hard to eliminate them altogether. So trans fats are a side effect of the industrial process of turning oils into these spreadable fats. And it's called hydrogenation. And trans fats are only partially hydrogenated fats and they are extremely toxic to the arteries, causing atherosclerosis, which is the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes. Butter has trans fats too, but they're natural and it's not known what their toxic effects are. But you do not want to be eating any trans fats at all in your diet if you can avoid them.
- [09:12]
Belinda Smith
So that sounds bad when we hear about margarine in more recent decades having like lowers your cholesterol or has healthy fats in it. What's happening at the fat level in butter versus margarine?
- [09:26]
Norman Swan
Well, that's where the change in margarine has occurred over recent years. And the dominant fat in a lot of margarines, not all, but a lot of margarines, is polyunsaturated fats. And that's what makes a difference now in terms of the health outcome between butter and margarine. So let's start with butter and the saturated. So butter is mostly saturated fat. When you look at the evidence so this is, is butter going to increase your risk of heart disease? We've just said that trans fats are really toxic for your arteries and you really don't want to be taking trans fats in anything if you can avoid it. And if you're taking a food with trans fats, it's got to be at really low levels. But what about butter as a dominantly saturated fat product? When you look at the evidence, and there's been some very large studies, and we'll put the links to some of those in our show notes, you look at the very large studies, most of them do not convincingly show a risk from whole fat dairy products, which would include butter. Now this is not to say it's a very nuanced conversation because saturated fats are bad for your arteries. So take saturated fats in the form of red meat or other products, non dairy products, they are not good for your coronary arteries. Then there's a paradox that it looks as though saturated fat in dairy products does not seem to have the same adverse effects on your arteries. And it's not that they're good for your arteries, it's just that there's something in whole dairy which mitigates the effect of saturated fat. So I'm not here to recommend that everybody goes on to whole fat dairy versus low fat, because there are some studies which do show increased risks, but by and large the risks aren't what you'd expect for the level of saturated fat. So a modest amount of butter in your diet, for example, spreading it on toast in the morning, is unlikely to affect your low density lipoprotein cholesterol to any significant extent.
- [11:41]
Belinda Smith
That's your bad cholesterol.
- [11:43]
Norman Swan
That's your bad cholesterol.
- [11:44]
Belinda Smith
Basically, it shouldn't make that much of a difference.
- [11:47]
Norman Swan
It seems to be relatively neutral. Then the question is, which is better for you? Margarine versus butter. And most head to head comparisons would suggest that margarine with polyunsaturated fats in them do reduce your cholesterol. So butter's neutral by and large, but margarine is actually active on your cholesterol and reduces it, particularly the margarines that are designed to reduce your cholesterols with the plant sterols in them. And it's because the polyunsaturated fats compete with the uptake of saturated fat, particularly cholesterol from your gut and they get preferentially taken up from your diet rather than the saturated fat itself, particularly the cholesterol. So polyunsaturated margarines, if you're talking about coronary heart disease and you've got a problem with cholesterol, are probably good for you. Butter is neutral.
- [12:41]
Belinda Smith
So it sounds like the answer to your question then is which is better for you? It probably is margarine.
- [12:47]
Norman Swan
Yes. Some people would argue that there's a problem. You're always going to have problems with margarines because they're manufactured and they're an ultra processed food. But when they've looked at it, particularly in relation to coronary heart disease, particularly the margarines with phytosterols in them are good for you, they reduce your cholesterol level. But if your cholesterol is okay, it's not that high and you're not taking that much butter in your diet, essentially you've got butter there to spread on your toast or a tiny pan of butter to fry your egg, then you're really not going to come to any harm.
- [13:19]
Belinda Smith
Well, that's reassuring if you like butter. Well, kind of on both counts, I suppose. We've spoken almost exclusively about artery health. Are there any other health parameters that we should be taking into consideration when we're talking about butter and margarine?
- [13:32]
Norman Swan
Yes, I mean, these are fats and so both are calorie dense. So if you're going to be taking a mountain of margarine, a mountain of butter, you're likely to put on weight. And there is some evidence that if you take calories as fat, you're more likely to put it on as fat. Some people thought that was a myth for a while, but it looks as though there's a metabolic pathway that you're more likely to put on fat. And therefore there's a route between a high fat diet and type 2 diabetes. And it's largely through the weight that you put on the fat around your waist. That also translates to an increased risk of cancer and poorer outcomes if you've got cancer. So that's about weight gain and that's about dominating your diet with fat, rather than a mix of fat, carbohydrate and.
- [14:20]
Belinda Smith
Protein, which really isn't the question we're being asked. We're really being asked about the comparison between the two. And I suppose what it kind of plays into is this idea of focusing on particular foods or particular nutrients and not looking at the basis, a big dietary pattern, the overall diet that someone's eating across their day, week, life. And if you're really following, you know, Mediterranean diet, you're probably eating a diet of nutrient dense whole foods. You're probably getting fats from nuts and olive oil and avocado. You might not need as much margarine or butter in your diet anyway. And tell me if I'm wrong, Norman. Like the small changes that you might be getting from butter versus margarine really kind of get lost in the noise of broadly healthy or broadly unhealthy diet.
- [15:08]
Norman Swan
With one exception. Much as we on what's that rash love. The Mediterranean diet is the level of your cholesterol and whether you need to get that down. A Mediterranean diet tends to be a bit neutral for your cholesterol. The reason the cholesterol comes down on a Mediterranean diet when you shift from a Western kind of diet with high quantities of red meat, high quantities of saturated fat, is that you remove saturated fat from your diet without thinking about it because you've replaced it with monounsaturated fats, as you say, in avocado and in olive oil. But there's other things that happen in a Mediterranean diet which are the bioactive compounds that go along with that. And that's one of the theories, by the way, behind why whole fat dairy might not be quite as bad for you as it would have been predicted by its saturated fat content is that there are probably bioactive compounds in whole dairy which help to counteract the effects of the saturated fat. So there's a bit of a battle going on. But if you need to lower your cholesterol and you're dipp dipping your bread in olive oil, you might be better off spreading it with phytosterol margarine because that's going to reduce your cholesterol further than a Mediterranean diet. Almost certainly. Although the studies have. You know, I can't quote you a study that's good enough to hang your hat on or hang your arteries on.
- [16:26]
Belinda Smith
So I've spoken a bit about the fact that margarine had a bit of a makeover, a glow up in the last few decades, but then more recently than that, there's been sort of a shift back towards butter. What's going on?
- [16:38]
Norman Swan
I don't think they really know what's going on in Finland, where they had very high rates of coronary heart disease, some of the highest rates of coronary heart disease in the world. And they have this huge public health campaign where they try to change people's behavior, move them towards a more Mediterranean style diet and so on.
- [16:53]
Belinda Smith
Oh, wait, sorry.
- [16:55]
Norman Swan
Thank you. You're very slow on the uptake today, Tegan. And they've monitored people since that intervention which did reduce coronary heart disease rates and shift people away from saturated fat. As people have drifted back towards butter and it's not entirely clear why, it's. It's partly habit but it's also a belief that it's natural and therefore healthier for you. There has been a return to butter in places like Australia as well. Bulletproof coffee, where you stir butter into coffee. And some nutritionists who argue that saturated fat is actually good for you, but it's actually not good for you. That's misleading.
- [17:28]
Belinda Smith
So we're always sort of a little wary about giving cut and dried advice on what saturation. It's more like vibes and guidelines, but.
- [17:34]
Norman Swan
Bottom line and a schmear. A schmear on your toes.
- [17:37]
Belinda Smith
A schmear on your toes. But bottom line. For Naomi, Marion and anyone else who's.
- [17:41]
Norman Swan
Wondered if you love butter and you're taking it modestly and it's mainly for your toast in the morning and you're not having massive amounts of butter in your cooking, then stick with it. The evidence would suggest you're not doing yourself any harm. If you've got an issue and you want to get your cholesterol down in a polyunsaturated margarine, particularly one with phytosterols is the way to go, but not necessarily. Instead of medications is something you've got to talk over with your doctor because medication is still a highly effective way of getting your LDL cholesterol down to very low levels.
- [18:13]
Belinda Smith
Do you have a favorite butter recipe? Is it just butter?
- [18:18]
Norman Swan
Well, I do like butter and I do like a little bit of butter when I'm frying an egg and it's hard to make a really nice crumble without butter.
- [18:25]
Belinda Smith
Oh, yeah, I love a crumble. And yes, I think a butter fried in a butter fried in the egg. Exactly. I said what I said no.
- [18:32]
Norman Swan
And one croissant on a Saturday with your coffee.
- [18:35]
Belinda Smith
Naomi, Marion, thank you so much for the question. You can send your questions to that rashbc.net au also where you can send your feedback, which is what Matt has done. Norman, we spoke a couple of weeks ago about running and whether running is good or bad for your knees. Matt says he would like to contribute an N equals one study.
- [18:54]
Norman Swan
Excellent. We love N equals one study. And to remind new listeners to watch that rational n =1 studies. This is an experiment on yourself.
- [19:03]
Belinda Smith
On yourself or just on one person. So this is Matt's mum. Matt's mum has been running her whole life, sometimes 50k days plus per week when she was Younger. She's now in her mid-70s and was recently told by a physio that she has the knees of a 40 year old. Matt says, I found it encouraging as a casual runner myself, often worried I'm destroying my knees. It's an n equals 1. But it gives me hope that my knees will be going strong into my 70s. And he finishes. Mum is still running, even competing in the city to surf with times that would put some of my runner friends in their 30s to shame.
- [19:36]
Norman Swan
Great story, Matt. And it goes with the evidence that running is good for your joints. It's not going to wear them out. When you hear stories about exercise and joint wearing out, it's usually that sport has done it. Multiple injuries, say in rugby or netball or something else that's not great for your joints. But running, jogging, go for it.
- [19:53]
Belinda Smith
So we just congratulated ourselves on getting it right, but we have a. I think it's a correction or an apology required. There's an email from Liam who says in this week's episode, as in it was a while ago now, Norman made disparaging remarks about Cavoodles only being able to walk 100 metres. Charlie, my three year old cavoodle would like me to inform Norman that at least once a week he joins me on my 8 to 10 kilometre run and will be participating in an upcoming dog friendly trail run in October.
- [20:24]
Norman Swan
I am so sorry, Charlie. I will not give any apologies to cats, but to Cavoodles, I'm on my hands and knees begging forgiveness.
- [20:34]
Belinda Smith
On your hands and knees in front of a cavoodle? You're gonna get licked in the face, Norman. Yes, well, thank you Liam. Thank you Matt for your emails. Thatrashbc.net au is our email address again and we'll catch you again here next week.
- [20:46]
Norman Swan
See?
- [21:11]
Belinda Smith
So Norman, I would like to know what your relationship was to Margarine growing up.
- [21:16]
Norman Swan
My relationship with margarine? Well, margarine, we didn't have much money when I was growing up, so we mostly had margarine rather than butter.