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Butter vs. Margarine
This article began life as our response to a widely-circulated story enticingly-labelled “Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?”. It has evolved but we have retained it because we feel it is a wonderful visual image to help develop awareness about our health.
We feel the situation is much the same as herbal medicine vs. synthetic medicine and serves as a vivid illustration of our modern world:
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Herbs are naturally-occurring whole plants of which many have a wide range profound healing properties and can be of immense value to us humans.
However the industrial approach to exploiting these healing properties is to extract the “active ingredient” in a laboratory, synthesise it is bulk in a chemical factory, bulk it up with supposedly inactive “bulking agents”, package it attractively and market it as a “miracle drug”.
The key being that in the whole plant there are many ingredients present which act to balance the effects on the human system which prevent the development of side-effects. In the synthetic drugs, no effort appears to have been made to recognise or reproduce this “wholistic” formulation and so many synthetic drugs produce a wide-range of health-depleting side-effects from nausea to death.
Whether these drugs are "one molecule away from being plastic" or not doesn't really matter, they are synthetic, unwholesome and sacrifice the individual user's long-term health for short-term convenience and profit of the manufacturer.
And that goes for margarine too and all synthetic-based factory-processed foods.
Fergus & Trijtnje Reilly
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And now for the urban legend:
Butter vs. Margarine
Both have the same amount of calories
About Butter
- 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, whereas 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 whereas margarine has been around for less then 100 years
Now for Margarine...
- Lowers HDL cholesterol (and this is the good one)
- Increases the risk of cancers by up to five-fold
- Lowers quality of breast milk
- Decreases immune response
- Decreases insulin response
- And here is the most disturbing fact.... Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE from being PLASTIC.*
This fact alone should be enough to have you avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated - this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the food
EXPERIMENT: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or a shaded area.
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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 weenie micro-organisms will not find a home to grow on...Why?
because it is nearly plastic.
Which begs the question:
Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?
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We have published the above "article" more for it's colourful imagery than as a scientifically rigorous analysis - in fact the statements are largely uncorroborated and we have not taken the time to independantly verify them ourselves. However we liked the flavour and so we added to the website.
We have received some feedback from it and feel it is only fair that readers can see the feedabck.
Feedback
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You have:
"Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE from being PLASTIC."
This is false. It was made up to make an email more interesting.
The question of whether or not, "margarine is but one molecule away from being plastic." is the equivalent of asking whether or not corn oil or soy bean oil or peanut oil is "one molecule" away from being plastic.
Like butter, margarine is about 80% fat and 20% water and solids. But being from vegetable sources, it lacks cholesterol. It is flavoured, coloured, and fortified with vitamins and so "nutritionally" it is very similar to butter - without the cholesterol. Today, soy and corn oils predominate as the source - eating margarine is really not that much different from eating the raw oils from either corn or soy. Yes, it has been hydrogenated but it is certainly a lot lower in saturated fats than butter. Indeed, the proportion of saturated fats in liquid oils, tub or soft margarines, hard margarines, and butter increase in that order.
To me it is a matter of taste. I choose butter.
-JP-
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