Butter Beats Margarine

- Roger Mason

     

In the early 1900's scientists found out vegetable oil could be hardened to imitate butter by a sophisticated process of intense pressure, hydrogen gas and rare metal catalysts. This produced "hydrogenated" fats also known as "trans fatty acids". These do not exist in nature and must be made in the laboratory. Hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated fats are ubiquitous in our foods now and it is almost impossible to avoid them.

How anyone promoted hydrogenated fat as healthier than natural fats is difficult to believe but today this asininity is more prevalent than ever. Most people are uninformed enough to actually think it is healthier to eat margarine than butter. Our bodies know what saturated animal fat is, and can deal with it in small amounts, but our bodies do not know what trans fatty acids are and cannot deal with them as they are unnatural, synthetic, manmade and foreign to our systems. Trans fatty acids end up as excess cholesterol and deposits on our arteries.

Currently Americans and Europeans eat up to 15 grams of trans fatty acids a day which is about 5% of their total calorie intake. Americans eat an astounding 42% fat calories on the average and most of these calories come from saturated animal fats and hydrogenated oils. And we wonder why we have such stratospheric coronary heart disease and then look to our medical doctors to butcher and poison us to "cure" our high cholesterol levels, strokes and heart attacks. If you want to know how to have a healthy heart and circulatory system find one of those old Nathan Pritikin books or one of the new books by his son Robert. You can find these on the internet easily and inexpensively if your local library can't locate one. Pritikin was not a medical doctor but healed people with heart conditions by simply feeding them a low fat, high fiber diet based on whole, complex carbohydrates like brown rice, whole grain bread, oatmeal, whole grain pasta, potatoes, sweet potatoes and a wide variety of beans. And then they would simply walk as much as they could up to an hour a day. That's all- low fat diet and walking.

Hydrogenated oils are the very worst fat you can eat, yet people gobble up endless tons of them every year. READ YOUR LABELS! If the product contains hydrogenated oil don't buy it. Ask the restaurant where you eat if the bread, rolls, pizza, corn chips or whatever has hydrogenated fat in them. You can bet most anything you get out of a fast food outlet is full of hydrogenated oil.

I won't mention all the human studies that have been published in medical journals proving that trans fatty acids cause coronary heart disease, but will say these have been published for decades and prove unequivocally that they raise total cholesterol, raise bad LDL cholesterol and lower good HDL cholesterol. They also raise a blood marker called "Lp(a)" or lipoprotein a which is a predictor of heart disease. This has been shown to be true at the University of Kuopio in Finland, Tufts University in Boston, Wagengin Agricultural University in the Netherlands, in the famous Framingham Study, the University of Oslo in Norway and many other clinics around the world.

In the Netherlands, doctors studied 698 postmenopausal women and actually took biopsies of fat from their bodies. They concluded, "The adipose concentration of trans fatty acids showed a positive association with breast cancer" Do you doubt the same results would be found if they did the same study with men and prostate cancer?

What can you do? Stop eating in those grease pits called fast food restaurants. They sell more hydrogenated fats than anyone. Read your labels and stop buying food that contains these. Refuse to eat any food that contains hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil. If you like margarine either go back to real butter or buy "Smart Balance" which is a non-hydrogenated spread made from palm oil which is solid when refrigerated. The health food stores sell "Spectrum Spread" but it is pricey.

We have already discussed in this column that cholesterol can be lowered by natural, inexpensive, safe and proven supplements such as beta-sitosterol, soy isoflavones, guggul gum (an Indian herb extract), flax oil, beta glucan and other synergistic supplements like vitamin E, magnesium and beta carotene. Why anyone would take a toxic, expensive, prescription statin drug you see advertised on TV constantly, just makes you wonder if the real issue here is not merely ignorance but outright self destruction. Stop eating hydrogenated oil. Read your labels. Write to the manufacturers of the foods you like that contain them and tell them you won't buy them anymore. It is literally better to eat butter on your bread and cook your pork chops in lard than it is to eat these unnatural, synthetic, harmful fats.