Butter vs. margarine: What does science say? | Dr Sarah Berry

[Music] hello and welcome to Zoe shorts the bite size podcast where we discuss one topic around science and nutrition I'm Jonathan Wolfe and today I'm joined by Dr Sarah Berry today's subject is butter versus margarine [Music] powdered across many households are you team butter or are you team margarine now they might appear quite similar but they affect our bodies in different ways and do you think we'll be able to Crown a Champion by the end of this episode well what we will be able to do is clear up some misconceptions that we're going to address and there's some excellent research that will definitely help us get closer to An Answer great stuff let's spread the word now before we begin I have a favor to ask 63 of people that watch this podcast haven't hit the Subscribe button and 11 haven't pressed the Bell to turn on notifications about new episodes we want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of Millions so if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please hit the Subscribe button and turn notifications on doing us this small favor will really help thank you okay Sarah so to start our journey into spreads I want to take you back to 19th century France the year is 1869 and France is at War in an attempt to feed his troops for less money Napoleon calls for the development of a low-cost alternative to butter step forward a man with a wonderful name hippolyte mezmuri who used animal fat and milk to create the first ever margarine so not suitable for vegetarians then I think not but Jonathan that changed in 1902 when a German scientist developed a process to harden oils using a method called hydrogenation okay that sounds pretty scary what exactly is hydrogenation so hydrogenation is a process that turns a liquid oil like canola oil or soya bean oil into a hard fat like margarine it's a chemical process that changes the unsaturated fatty acids in this seed oil to a saturated fatty acid and what this does is changes the chemical structure of the oil but increases the melting point or more plainly makes it a harder fat okay so I think I understand what you're saying is the the oil is now a solid and the unsaturated fat that was in the oil has now become a saturated fat well it depends on exactly how it's made so the techniques have moved on quite a bit and how margarine has made today is quite different um to how it was made back then it also depends on where you live and we can talk a little bit about this in a minute but broadly speaking unsaturated fatty acids usually make up about 65 to 80 percent of the fats in margarine so that sounds sort of really amazing what you're saying is that we can turn oil into margarine with these modern chemical techniques so how is that different from the process of turning milk into butter so to make butter milk is solidified by churning so if you try and imagine an old-fashioned Butter Churn you're probably picturing someone moving a lawn wooden plunger up and down in a barrel full of milk which I'm guessing is not how in fact the butter turns up uh you know in uh in the shop but uh it's definitely sort of my mental image that makes me feel good about it do you know what broadly speaking in the same principles apply by churning this milk the milk is being agitated and the fat molecules Clump together and after a lot of this hard churning you're left with a solid lump of butter and then a very low fat liquid at the bottom called buttermilk and the the fats in the butter that you're referring to here those are saturated fats is that right yeah so butter is what we would call a saturated Rich fat so about 60 to 70 percent of the fatty acids in butter are saturated unlike the margarines which have about 70 unsaturated fatty acids so our team did some research to look at actually um the consumption of butter and margarine uh in the states over um over the uh almost the last 100 years so at the start of the 1940s apparently consumption of butter really started to drop and in the 1950s low price margarine took over as the most popular spread and interestingly since then butter consumption has actually remained pretty stable at around four to six pounds which is two to three kilograms per person per year which when you think about it all on its own in a year it sounds like quite a lot of butter however interestingly in the 1990s margarine consumption started to dip quite sharply and since 2013 uh in the states butter has once again been the most popular option yeah they're really interesting statistics Jonathan and this dip in margarine consumption that you've talked about was largely to do with people being concerned about the types of fats that were in margarine that's really interesting so Sarah um I'd love for you to take a look at the fats then and the health impacts of both butter and margarine and from what you've told us so far one of the main differences between the two is the proportion of saturated versus unsaturated fats yeah so one of the biggest differences is that butter has more saturated fat and margarine has more unsaturated mono and polyunsaturated fats and this is largely why butter has been perceived to be potentially unhealthy because of the large amount of saturated fat that's in butter because we know that saturated fat raises your levels of bad cholesterol LDL cholesterol we know that saturated fat can increase inflammation we know that it can also affect other processes in our body such as clotting for example now if you want to find out more about this we do have various podcasts where we've really dived into the effects of both saturated fats and also fats and oils on our health so we do have the podcast fats and oils what's the real story and also one just unsaturated fats whether they're monstrous or misunderstood so I would recommend people go and have a deep dive into those to really understand this a bit more So based upon what you're just saying it sounds like butter is sort of in the naughty Corner because obviously that's the one with all the saturated fats um it hasn't been rescued by you know magic bacteria at this point um but I think a lot of people listen to this will say well hang on a minute what about the processing that's associated with making margarine right we've talked about processed foods and particularly Ultra processed foods many times on this show and it looks like margarine belongs in that um Camp so does that in fact mean that margarine is less healthy than butter so to understand this Jonathan we need to first look at how the manufacturing of margarines changed over the last few Deca decades because 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 and this is most notably regarding the presence of trans fats in how they were historically made oh yes trans fats we actually had a again we had a podcast with you explaining this and Sarah if I remember correctly the takeaway is that trans fats are really really really really really bad for you so that's right it is really really really bad for you um industrial trans fats are a product of partial hydrogenation now if you look online you'll see loads of information warning you about the Petals of trans fats in margarine however this information is outdated in 2007 the World Health Organization put forward a global proposal to reduce these industrially produced trans fats and we've done a bit of research on the effect of this proposal and in 2021 28 countries had mandatory trans fat limits in place which accounts for about 2.8 billion people which means the majority of people are living in places where they're they're not limited but it does mean that for many of us so if you listen to this in the US or uh or in Europe um trans fat and margarine is not something that we need to be worrying about anymore yeah absolutely right and in fact trans fats were actually removed from most Foods in the UK and the US way before 2007. um and I think it's this fear of trans fats in margarines that probably explain to this dip that you talked about in the popularity of margarine that we saw in the 1990s now the problem is Jonathan is with the removal of trans fat from the margarines as the hard fat we need to find another way of creating hard fats that give suitable melting points for margarine what we need to remember with fats and oils is one of the really important roles they play is their functional role in food and so by this I mean their milk profile that they confer to a food so I always use chocolate as a great example of this so chocolate contains cocoa butter as the main fat and cocoa butter melts at 37 degrees Celsius and this is body temperature so when you put the chocolate in your mouth one of the reason it has that wonderful mouth feel is because it melts as it warms up to your body temperature the same applies to when we think about margarines and we think about butter what is is it that's special about butter it's the Melt profile of the butter whether it's used in bakery or sped on your toes and so what the food industry need to do is try and mimic that with the spreads which is why it's really important to replace the hard trans fats with another kind of hard fat so could you tell us how they now make margarine given that the old um way they did it created these trans fats and was so dangerous how does it happen today so Jonathan is done quite differently in the UK um and the US and I'd like to just spend half a minute explaining how the processes are different so that we can understand why the health effects might also be different all right you you geek out for a minute Sarah okay so in the US margarine is now made for a process called Full hydrogenation typically using soybean oil so in the process of full hydrogenation what happens is you change an unsaturated fat to a saturated fat as we mentioned before this fat then becomes really really hard now the problem is it's too hard uh to be spreadable so what we now need to do is blend it with a liquid oil okay we need to blend this fully hydrogenated fat with a liquid oil to give it the suitable Mel profile so what they typically do is take this fully hydrogenated fat and blend it with the original soya bean oil which makes this spreadable fat that can be taken straight from the fridge and can be spread from the fridge so in the UK it's a little bit different and this is because in the UK we think of the word hydrogenation to be unacceptable because it's perceived to be the same as partial hydrogenation which produces trans fat so even though full hydrogenation doesn't produce trans fats consumers won't buy a product made in this way so instead manufacturers use a process called intra sterification and this is actually what I did my PhD on an an area of research I'm still actively researching um and so if you would give me an hour I'd love to talk about this Jonathan maybe give us the highlights Sarah so the process of Interest verification changes the structure of the fat molecules which then changes the melting profile of the fat okay it doesn't change the amount of saturated monounsaturated it just changes the structure of where the molecules sit within the fat so that again you can have a spread that has the suitable melt profile so that it's semi-hard in the fridge and then soft for spreading when you take it out of the fridge what does this mean in the end these different processing for sort of uh Health properties of margarine does it end up looking quite similar or is there something you really need to look at you know is one margarine very different from another margarine because of the different ways the margarines are made in the US and the UK the main difference is is that in the US the saturated fatty acid is predominantly stearic acid and in the UK the saturated fatty acids are predominantly a saturated fat called palmitic acid and these behave a little bit differently in the body which is why it's quite difficult actually comparing U.S spreads with UK spreads or I've just recently completed a study looking at exactly this looking at the palmitic acid Rich spreads in the UK versus the stearic acid Rich spreads in the US and my studies actually found that there's no difference in the health effects between these two spreads when they're fed for six weeks to individuals we talk about this definition of ultra processed food is something you can't make in your own kitchen and what seems to keep me clear is whether that's the us or the UK like you cannot make this in your kitchen this is like really this is like a chemistry lab um is that fair yeah it's fair to say you couldn't make this at home involves multiple processing steps as well as extracting the oil there are chemicals that are added in so emulsifies for example so that it does stick together colorants are often used so that it has that nice kind of yellow orange color that mimics butter and there's some additives that might be added in as well a lot of spreads though now that are sole do have quite a low number of ingredients added in in an attempt to make sure they are as healthy as possible but you are correct that we would not be able to make these spreads in a typical home cooking setup it was it fair to say that my in all these examples margarine will end up being viewed as an ultra processed food I think using the current classification system correct yes so Sarah we've indulged you with an explanation of just how complicated it is to make margarine but I'd love to talk about okay what's the relative um healthfulness of these um two and I think that you know one of the things that I've learned over the last few years is that you know the magic of the food Matrix and the complexity of human beings means that you can look at things just in terms of saturated fat or whatever and actually the impact on humans is completely different so could you talk us through like the human research studies that can help us to answer this question we started with what's better butter or margarine yeah so what we would typically do Jonathan when we try and look at the health effects of a food um and certainly on the podcast when you and I are talking about it we'd always start looking at population studies don't we we always start by looking at okay if we're following different populations uh over a number of years how does this food versus that food impact our health now it's really tricky to do this with when we're looking at the health effects of butter versus margarine given that over the last 20 years the composition of margarine has totally changed so if I was to look at these studies 30 40 years ago it would very clearly show while margarines are so bad for us because they've got all these trans fats so what we've had to rely on is firstly looking at studies that look specifically at people consuming butter and then look at randomized control trials that these very tightly controlled studies that feed people different amounts of butter and different amounts of margarines and look at how they impact their health so what we know firstly is that if you're consuming butter at quite normal levels so not to excess and we follow you over many number of years it seems to have a very small impact on your health outcome okay if you're consuming large amounts so for example in Finland they used to consume up to about 45 grams per day and that's huge so a portion of butter if you think of those little packs Jonathan that you get when you go to a hotel or a cafeteria you know the little sachets you get typically have only about six grams of butter in them 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 now at that intake I think it's quite clear that this population kind of evidence shows that wow that's too high it's not great for your health now 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 or 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 and we always need to think Jonathan when we talk about research showing the health effects of foods about how much of it we actually consume and it's different across different countries okay 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 now these are short-term studies typically the longest these are is maybe 2024 weeks and I think it's really important to to say that we need to still understand what the long-term impact is of the spreads that do we actually see over long term this favorable impact playing out and the reason that I caveat this is because there are these other ingredients that we talked about in spread so like emulsifies that we don't yet fully understand how they impact our health and I know that um you know if Tim was here he talks about this there are a bunch of things in these um margarines because they're Ultra processed that we know has an impact on you know the microbiome like emulsifies and we don't understand what the long-term impact of that is so potentially I I think he would be saying you might be over you're sort of overstating the benefit because you might see these short-term benefits you're not going to be able to see the longer term um drawbacks yeah I think that that's that's a really fair representation of um how we need to think about this that certainly and it's especially for people that have high cholesterol if you do consume a reasonable amount of butter swapping to one of these unsaturated fat Rich spreads will have a benefit on reducing your cholesterol but I think that Tim has a really important point to make is that because these spreads that we're now consuming are relatively new we need to really try and think about um understanding what the long-term health impact is and I I'd love just you know as we're summing up share I guess what I'm doing as a result of talking to both you and Tim and other people which is um I mainly use extra virgin olive oil so you know in the past I think um I would have cooked quite a bit with butter I definitely use extra virgin olive oil there and um for sort of everything that I'm I'm frying but also um I use it a lot on you know if I have toast in the morning and I have toasted rye bread quite often I I pour lots of olive oil over it and that's fine and I use a knife and fork and it tastes fantastic I've got used to it and I think that everyone is agreeing that the health properties of the extra virgin olive oil are much better than the margarine or the butter so it feels to me like you know to me part of this answer is I wouldn't go and put margarine all over my food every day I wouldn't put butter all over my food every day because it adds up I like that and then every so often I have like if I'm out at the restaurant there's butter I definitely put it on the bread it tastes delicious and I think about that as being like it's a it's a treat in the same way as um other things Retreat um and I really enjoy I have to say like the flavor and the taste of the butter now that it's something I don't have as often I actually think I appreciate it more um it's a bit like you know you might decide to have a glass of wine it's like it tastes good nobody's telling you that it's really going to be great for your health but you know these are parts of life is Is For Living and um you know feeling that nothing should really be off the table which I know is is something that's that that we believe a lot and I have been sold on yeah absolutely Jonathan so 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 that 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 kind of cooking so I think at low levels it's fine but I think that what we should be trying to do is find other oils to cook with where we don't necessarily need that or desire that kind of creamy texture of butter I think it's brilliant and I think everyone's always really interested in what you're actually doing Sarah and I guess the point to leave this is I know that you and Tim are working with a number of other scientists really to work more on this question around Ultra processed foods to try and understand based upon the latest data with all this new microbiome information everything to try and better understand you know what is it within Ultra processed foods that seems to be really causing um uh that the damage that we see and that might allow us to better understand like actually as margarine um maybe not quite as good as we've been thinking or do we continue to feel good about um it's um you know relatively high score I would say if you look for most people within Zoe compared to butter yeah Jonathan I've been teaching undergraduate nutrition students at King's College London for the last 20 years about the health effects of fat and I start every lecture by telling them what I'm telling you now might be different next year or in five years and 10 years which I know can be quite frustrating for listeners but actually it should be something to have confidence in that we are actively researching all of this so that we can make sure that we give the best most recent uh evidence to people amazing thank you very much Sarah thank you for having me well if after all of that you want to know how your body responds to butter and margarine then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program you can learn more and get 10 off by going to join zoe.com podcast I'm Jonathan wolf and I'm Sarah Berry join us next week for another Zoe podcast foreign [Music]

Channel: ZOE

Views: 62,444

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, gut health foods, sarah berry, sara berry, professor sarah berry, butter vs margarine, saturated fat, unsaturated fats, saturated, saturated fat vs unsaturated fat

Id: wsd6D39EoTc

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023