Butter, Margarine And Fats In General

Categories: Diet and Nutrition
Sources: How And When To Be Your Own Doctor

Recently, enormous propaganda has been generated against eating

butter. Its been smeared in the health magazines as a saturated

animal fat, one containing that evil substance, cholesterol. Many

people are now avoiding it and instead, using margarine.



Composition of Oils



Saturated Monosaturated Unsaturated

Butter 66% 30% 4%

Coconut Oil 8 % 6% 2%

Cottonseed Oil 26% 18% 52%

Olive Oil 13% 74% 8%

Palm Oil 49% 37% 9%

Soybean Oil 14% 24% 58%

Sunflower Oil 4% 8% 83%

Safflower Oil 3% 5% 87%

Sesame Oil 5% 9% 80%

Peanut Oil 6% 12% 76%

Corn Oil 3% 7% 84%



This is a major and serious misunderstanding. First of all,

margarine is almost indigestible, chemically very much like

shortening--an artificially saturated or hydrogenated vegetable fat.

Hydrogenated fats can't be properly broken down by the body's

digestive enzymes, adding to the body's toxic load. Margarine, being

a chemically-treated vegetable oil with artificial yellow color and

artificial flavorings to make it seem like butter, also releases

free radicals in the body that accelerate aging. So, to avoid the

dangers of eating cholesterol-containing butter, people eat

something far worse for them!



There are severe inconsistencies with the entire

"cholesterol-is-evil" theory. Ethnic groups like the Danes, who eat

enormous quantities of cholesterol-containing foods, have little

circulatory disease. Actually, the liver itself produces

cholesterol; it's presence in the blood is an important part of the

body chemistry. Cholesterol only becomes a problem because of

deranged body chemistry due to the kind of overall malnutrition

Americans usually experience on their junk food diets. Avoiding

cholesterol in foods does little good, but eating a low-fat,

low-sugar, complex-carbohydrate (whole foods) diet high in minerals

does lower blood cholesterol enormously.



Actually, high quality fresh (not rancid) butter in moderate

quantities is about the finest fat a person could eat. But high

quality butter is almost unobtainable. First of all, it has to be

raw, made from unpasteurized cream. Second, butter can contain very

high levels of fat-soluble vitamins, but doesn't have to.

Vitamin-rich butter's color is naturally bright yellow, almost

orange. This color does not come from a test tube. Pale yellow

butter as is found in the commercial trade was probably almost white

before it was artificially tinted. Butter from grass-pastured cows

naturally changes from yellow-orange to white and back again through

the year as the seasons change. Spring grass, growing in the most

intense sunlight of the year contains very high levels of

chlorophyll and vitamins. Cows eating this grass put high levels of

vitamins A and D into their cream, evidenced by the orange color of

vitamin A. By July, natural butter has degraded to medium-yellow in

color. By August, it is pale yellow. Industrial dairy cows fed

exclusively on hay or artificial, processed feeds (lacking in these

vitamins), produce butterfat that is almost white.



I prefer to obtain my butter from a neighbor who has several dairy

cows grazing on fertile bottom land pasture. We always freeze a

year's supply in late spring when butter is at its best.

Interestingly, that is also the time of year when my neighbor gets

the most production from her cows and is most willing to part with

25 pounds of extra butter.



In general, fats are poor foods that should be avoided. Their ratio

of nutrition to calories is absolutely the worst of all food types,

except perhaps for pure white sugar, which is all calories and

absolutely no nutrition (this is also true for other forms of sugar.

Honey, too, contains almost no nutrition.). Gram for gram, fats

contain many more calories than do sugars or starches. Yet gram for

gram, fats contain virtually no nutrition except for small

quantities of essential fatty acids.



The perverse reason people like to eat fats is that they are very

hard to digest and greatly slow the digestive action of the stomach.

Another way of saying that is that they have a very high satiety

value. Fats make a person feel full for a long time because their

presence in the stomach makes it churn and churn and churn. Fats

coat proteins and starches and delay their digestion, often causing

them to begin fermenting (starches) or putrefying (proteins) in the

digestive tract.



The best fats contain high levels of monosaturated vegetable oils

that have never been exposed to heat or chemicals--like virgin olive

oil. Use small quantities of olive oil for salad dressing.

Monosaturated fats also have far less tendency to go rancid than any

other type. Vegetable oils with high proportions of unsaturated

fats, the kind that all the authorities push because they contain no

cholesterol, go rancid rapidly upon very brief exposure to air. The

danger here is that rancidity in vegetable oil is virtually

unnoticeable. Rancid animal fat on the other hand, smells "off."

Eating rancid oil is a sure-fire way to accelerate aging, invite

degenerative conditions in general, and enhance the likelihood of

cancer. I recommend that you use only high-quality virgin olive oil,

the only generally-available fat that is largely monosaturated.

(Pearson and Shaw, 1983)



When you buy vegetable oil, even olive oil, get small bottles so you

use them up before the oil has much time being exposed to air (as

you use the oil air fills the bottle) or, if you buy olive oil in a

large can to save money, immediately upon opening it, transfer the

oil to pint jars filled to the very brim to exclude virtually all

air, and seal the jars securely. In either case, keep now-opened,

in-use small bottles of oil in the refrigerator because rancidity is

simply the combination of oil with oxygen from the air and this

chemical reaction is accelerated at warmer temperatures and slowed

greatly at cold ones.



Chemical reactions typically double in speed with every 10 degrees

C. increase in temperature. So oil goes rancid about six times

faster at normal room temperature than it does in the fridge. If

you'll think about the implications of this data you'll see there

are two powerful reasons not to fry food. One, the food is coated

with oil and gains in satiety value at the expense of becoming

relatively indigestible and productive of toxemia. Secondly, if

frying occurs at 150 degrees Centigrade and normal room temperature

is 20 degrees Centigrade, then oil goes rancid 2 to the 13th power

faster in the frying pan, or about 8,200 times faster. Heating oil

for only ten minutes in a hot skillet induces as much rancidity as

about 6 weeks of sitting open and exposed to air at room

temperature. Think about that the next time you're tempted to eat

something from a fast food restaurant where the hot fat in the deep

fryer has been reacting with oxygen all day, or even for several

days.



Back to butter, where we started. If you must have something

traditionally northern European on your bread, you are far better

off to use butter, not margarine. However, Mediterranean peoples

traditionally dip their bread in high-quality extra-virgin olive oil

that smells and tastes like olives. Its delicious, why not try it.

But best yet, put low-sugar fruit preserves on your toast or develop

a taste for dry toast. Probably the finest use for butter is melted

over steamed vegetables. This way only small quantities are needed

and the fat goes on something that is otherwise very easy to digest

so its presence will not produce as many toxins in the digestive

tract.