Margarine vs. Butter ... Know the Difference

[Ivan Seeking]

I just got this in an email and thought that it was a good one for scrutiny here at PF.

Pass The Butter ... please
This is interesting . . . .

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings.

DO YOU KNOW.. the difference between margarine and butter?

Read on to the end...gets very interesting!

Both have the same amount of calories.

Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.

Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few
only because they are added!

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods.

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years .

And now, for Margarine..

Very high in trans fatty acids .

Triple risk of coronary heart disease .
Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)

Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.

Lowers quality of breast milk.

Decreases immune response.

Decreases insulin response.

And here's the most disturbing fact... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC..

This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance).

You can try this yourself:

Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things:

* no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)

* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value ; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic . Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Sounds like it was produced by someone with a vested interest in promoting butter. Here is another point of view
Margarine
perhaps biased the other way.

My mother told me that margarine used to come with food coloring packaged separately. You would have to mix them together yourself if you wanted the yellow color. The butter industry had insisted on it.

 

[Evo]

http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/butter.asp

 

[mgb_phys]

I thought margarine was invented by the French to supply a long life butter to the armies.
edit - In 1869 Emperor Louis Napoleon III of France offered a prize to anyone who could make a satisfactory substitute for butter, suitable for use by the armed forces.

 

[turbo]

My wife and I have no margarine in the house, and cook with butter, olive oil, and peanut oil (for high-heat dishes). Deep-frying (infrequent) is best done with lard because you can use temperatures high enough to sear the food so the surface is crispy and retards the absorption of any more fat. We've been out of the trans-fat/hydrogenated food stream for years. Butter is the "secret ingredient" many French dishes and in simple steamed vegetable and herb dishes.

 

[Astronuc]

I mostly use butter and olive oil.

 

[wolram]

Beef dripping for me from now on.

 

[Moonbear]

I've never liked the taste of margarine, and it isn't the right texture for baking, so I've never really used it and don't care if it's better or worse for you than butter, because I'm sticking with my butter.

 

[turbo]

I've never liked the taste of margarine, and it isn't the right texture for baking, so I've never really used it and don't care if it's better or worse for you than butter, because I'm sticking with my butter.

Our local dairy farmer raised Jerseys and Guernseys (not Holsteins!) so cream occupied the top 25-30% of each milk bottle. We would shake it up and drink it that way, but my grandmother always poured off most of the cream, and used it in coffee and with berries and cereal for my grandfather's breakfasts, and every few days, she'd make up a batch of fresh butter. When I visited them, I loved waking up to a breakfast of freshly baked tall, flaky biscuits with fresh salty butter, eggs, bacon, and maybe some left-over baked beans and home-fried potatoes. Mmm! No margarine or shortening in her house, either. Butter, salt pork, and lard.

 

[SticksandStones]

Butter is too hard to spread. When they make butter that's actually soft I'll switch. :)

 

[turbo]

Butter is too hard to spread. When they make butter that's actually soft I'll switch. :)

You don't keep butter refrigerated. You keep it at room temperature in a covered butter dish, and it stays fresh and soft for a very long time. If you want to refrigerate your spread and have it stay spreadable, then you're going to use tubs of spreadable thickened vegetable oil.

 

[Moonbear]

Or you can just whip the butter to soften it in a hurry if you're not comfortable leaving it out. I usually just cut a few slices of butter off the stick and let them warm to room temp while I'm preparing whatever I'm eating (i.e., toasting the bread or baking the biscuits) so it's nice and soft when the food is ready for it.

 

[Evo]

Or you can just whip the butter to soften it in a hurry if you're not comfortable leaving it out. I usually just cut a few slices of butter off the stick and let them warm to room temp while I'm preparing whatever I'm eating (i.e., toasting the bread or baking the biscuits) so it's nice and soft when the food is ready for it.

I use whipped butter. Even though the new margarines with zero trans fat and no cholesterol are healthier than butter, I eat such tiny amounts it doesn't matter. Seriously, who would eat so much butter that it would matter?

 

[turbo]

I use whipped butter. Even though the new margarines with zero trans fat and no cholesterol are healthier than butter, I eat such tiny amounts it doesn't matter. Seriously, who would eat so much butter that it would matter?

Health-wise, consumption of butter vs margarine (in modest amounts) may not have a significant impact on one's well-being, but when taste and satisfaction is brought into the picture, butter kicks some serious butt. I'd be quite depressed if I could not have a little butter on my steamed sweet corn or buttercup squash or baked potato and had to settle for margarine. :yuck:

 

[DaveC426913]

Everyone's a cook? Not one science geek among us?

 

[mgb_phys]

i can only think of one non-cooking related use of butter, and that's film related.

 

[Evo]

Everyone's a cook? Not one science geek among us?

Cooking *is* science.

Except for my youngest daughter, for her cooking is dumping a pouch of some pre-mixed thing into boiling water and stirring. She can cook salmon fillets, remarkably, and she only uses real butter (to keep this on topic).

 

[turbo]

Everyone's a cook? Not one science geek among us?

Well, I'm an optician, a process chemist, an amateur astronomer, and for the last few years, an observational astronomer exploiting publicly-accessible databases of images, spectroscopy, etc. I'd rather be known as the best damned cook in the Maine woods. :rofl:

 

[Mk]

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.

Rule 34 of science - “If you can imagine it, there is a recent Harvard study proving it.”

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.

I suppose near anything you swallow will do that.

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.

“Appeal to tradition”

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC..

...it is nearly plastic . Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

I can see it now:

Table salt is but ONE ATOM away from being SODIUM!
How would you like to put that in you boiling water before you add the pasta?

no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)

Wait a second, butter is a fruit?

 

[hypatia]

I just don't like the way margarine feels on my tongue, feels waxy to me. I would half to agree with Turbo, its a must for good cooking. If I couldn't have it on my baked or mashed potatos, I wouldn't eat them.

 

[SticksandStones]

My parents keep bringing up the "one molecule away from being plastic" argument. I in turn inform them the beer that they're drinking is one molecule away from anti-freeze.

 

[Moonbear]

My parents keep bringing up the "one molecule away from being plastic" argument. I in turn inform them the beer that they're drinking is one molecule away from anti-freeze.

Yeah, that's the "play to those ignorant of science" argument. It just goes to show how many people paid no attention whatsoever in high school chemistry class. Heck, this topic is covered in grade school science, actually. A whole MOLECULE away...yeah...that would be the "margarine" molecule vs the "plastic" molecule? Any "pure" substance is only one molecule away from any other "pure" substance. It's worse than a "one atom away" argument (which we also all know means nothing)...table salt is only one MOLECULE away from arsenic. :rofl:

Hmm...it's not the texture of margarine that ever bugged me (referring to hypatia's comment), but the taste. It has none of the butter taste, but is very salty tasting to me. I'd rather use it as a substitute for salt than as a substitute for butter.

 

[turbo]

The only thing that I didn't like about when my grandmother made butter was that she kept trying to convince me that buttermilk was good to drink. Eventually, I figured out that if I kept praising her biscuits (tall, soft, and flaky with golden butter-topped crusts) she'd have to save the buttermilk to make the biscuits with and I wouldn't have to drink any more of it. I was raised on whole milk (non-homogenized, non pasteurized) and buttermilk had no character at all. Even pairing it up with her great apple pie, lemon chiffon pie, German chocolate cake, etc could not hide its deficiencies. She gave birth to my father a couple of years before the crash and the ensuing depression made those frugal people even more cognizant of waste, so she wanted to do something with the buttermilk, and I looked like a likely end-use. Luckily my appetite for buttermilk biscuits was enormous, and she'd make a batch about every 2 days when I visited them in the summers.

 

[Evo]

The only way to drink buttermilk is with salt, pepper and tabasco sauce. Sometimes, I get cravings for it, like now.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

As a child I hated whole milk, so I got buttermilk instead and liked it. Can't say the same for margarinemilk.

 

[Integral]

Kids are strange. In my childhood, my grandfather was a farmer, he had several hundred chickens, and a half dozen or so milk cows. I well remember watching him milk his cows, he taught me to multiply collecting, cleaning and candling eggs. Me let me crank the handle on the milk separator, I also got to help crank the handle of the churn making "grandmas butter"...

I wouldn't eat it, I much preferred the the stuff mom bought in the store...yep margarine. Looking back at it I can't believe how stupid I was, I have since learned to appreciate butter, but still have no problem with margarine.
..

 

[Huckleberry]

I just never bought into the health benefits of margarine over butter. I don't mind the taste of it, but I like the taste of butter. My mom used margarine and I was never happy with it. Give me butter and milk straight from the utter.

I think for dinner I'll have some complex carbohydrates smothered in molten plastic and a little arsenic to bring out the flavor. I'll wash it all down with some anti-freeze. I wonder what I'm almost made out of?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Be careful how far you carry this analogy, guys. I told my wife she was one molecule away from being a man. She said I was one frying pan away from being asleep.