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Hydrogenated Oils
Why butter might be better for you than margarine
How clued up are you on hydrogenated oils?
Have you spent the last few decades avoiding butter like the plague, assuming it would clog up your arteries and lead to almost instant death?
It now turns out that, if you've been piously sticking to low-fat margarines instead, you might have been better off on butter.
No one is disputing the health risks of saturated fats. They do cause problems for the body, but they're not as bad as the alternatives.
If you do your own cooking, then anything with pastry requires butter or lard as a major ingredient. For years, people have been using solid vegetable fat, thinking it was a healthy alternative.
If you buy ready-made sauces, biscuits or meals, chances are they had also moved towards vegetable oils as an alternative.
"Healthy" margarines boast about the nutritional benefits of their oils, be they sunflower, olive or even soya oil. It makes their products sound more natural and good for you. Yet these oils have been heavily processed before they even reach the tub. They have been degummed, washed, bleached, hydrogenated, filtered, refined, deodorised and emulsified. You have to ask yourself how much of the health-giving properties of the oils are left after all this?
The problem is that butter and lard are solid at room temperature, which is why they make good pastry and work well in many other baked foods, producing a better texture. Vegetable oil is naturally liquid at room temperature. So how do you get it in a block in the supermarket?
Scientists developed a process called hydrogenisation.
This process increases the saturation of the fat, changing its melting point and making it more solid at room temperature.
It also leads to the development of trans fats or trans fatty acids, which the body cannot digest. Recent research has linked these to heart disease and many experts believe they are more dangerous to human health than animal-derived saturated fats.
Trans fats and animal-derived saturated fats increase the levels of "bad" cholesterol in the body, but only trans fats decrease the levels of "good" cholesterol - a double whammie...
Generally, experts recommend that you reduce your consumption of trans fatty acids to just trace amounts in your body, otherwise you're putting yourself at risk of heart disease, liver problems, obesity and diabetes.
A Harvard nurses' study concluded that consuming just one gram of hydrogenated fats each day could increase your risk of coronary heart disease by 20%!
In some countries (such as Denmark), the use of hydrogenated vegetable oils is strictly controlled, but in the UK there is only a voluntary code that asks food manufacturers to make their labelling clearer. This means you, as the consumer, have to read the ingredients carefully for words such as:
- hydrogenated vegetable oil
- partially hydrogenated oils
- hydrolised vegetable oils
It can hide itself in biscuits, cakes, pizza, battered fish, breadcrumbed chicken, burgers, bread,
and chips - to name just a few.
Some companies (including M&S and Waitrose) have voluntarily removed hydrogenated fats from their products and some other supermarkets are following their lead. But a huge number of pre-prepared foods still contain this dangerous fat.
The only down-side to this is that many are swapping to palm oil - another baddie... Find out more about palm oil. |
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After all that, it seems that butter might actually be the healthier choice. As long as it's organic (i.e. no artificial growth hormones or routine antibiotics or GM feed given to the cows), it's much more natural than most vegetable oil margarines.
So what can you do?
One of the easiest ways to avoid these types of nasties is to adopt the following policy:
If you buy anything that's pre-prepared, read the ingredients first. If there's anything you don't understand, don't buy it.
The easier option, if you don't fancy your shopping taking hours?
Buy only organically certified food. The Soil Association prohibits the addition of hydrogenated fats in organic food. So if you buy organic, you're buying safer. Simple. |
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