From the archives: We’re back to leading the world in butter consumption – and that is bad news for our health, because it’s high in saturated fat and has poor nutritional content.In this 2017 feature from the New Zealand Listener archives, Nicky Pellegrino and Jennifer Bowden explore the effect of butter on New Zealander’s health.
By Nicky Pellegrino
Fat is good. Butter is back. Butter is “real food” with natural goodness. These are the types of messages being spread and this is worrying Rod Jackson. A professor of epidemiology at the University of Auckland, he has long been an outspoken opponent of the pro-fat lobby.
Jackson isn’t against all fats. He is a fan of the polyunsaturated and monounsaturated varieties. It’s saturated fats he is gunning for because of the overwhelming evidence that they’re bad for your heart. He says the pro-fat lobby often doesn’t mention this distinction, and what’s more, it isn’t talking about one of the good news stories of public health: we are living longer and are far less likely to die of a heart attack.
“Life expectancy in New Zealand is increasing by five hours a day,” says Jackson. “And there has been a 90% decrease in coronary heart disease mortality. When we first started watching this decline, we didn’t believe it. We looked at every possibility - that we’d changed diagnostic criteria, for instance. But there was no doubt it was going down in parallel with a decline in saturated-fat consumption.”
Our big butter-eating years were the early to mid-1960s, when we were getting through 20kg per person each year, says Jackson. “We were leaner than we are now, we ate less processed food, did more exercise and we were dropping dead from heart attacks and strokes at 10 times the rate we are now.”
People were advised to eat less saturated fat and they responded by turning to oils such as olive and canola. By the late 1960s, heart disease rates were starting to decline. Things changed in the 1980s, says Jackson. “The message was simplified to ‘eat less fat’, because cancer researchers had started to worry about fat as a cause of cancer.”
It had been reasonably easy for food manufacturers to respond to the “less-saturated fat” dictate by simply replacing unhealthy fats with healthier oils. But once they had to produce low-fat products, they looked for another replacement. Since salt already had a bad name, they chose sugar.
“That was a mistake,” says Jackson. “There is reasonable evidence to suggest that replacing fat with sugar led to increased weight.”
However, replacing fat with carbohydrates isn’t the best idea, either. Starchy carbs spike the blood sugar, but there is evidence they lower HDL cholesterol, widely known as the good cholesterol, Jackson says. And low HD levels are linked to a higher risk of heart disease as well as diabetes.
No protein or calcium
If we had just stayed with that first message and replaced saturated fats with polyunsaturated and monounsaturated ones rather than sugar and carbs, then we might not be in the grip of an obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Of course, there are other sources of saturated fat besides dairy - fatty cuts of red meat and coconut oil, for instance - so why is Jackson picking on butter? Partly, he says because all the claims about it being a “natural” food don’t stack up.
“It’s actually very refined. The natural product is milk; butter is the cream on top. It has no protein or calcium, it’s just the fat with a few vitamins you can get in other foods. Cheese and yoghurt are made from whole milk, so they have protein and calcium as well as fat. Butter is made from the bit that is overwhelmingly bad for you.”
We are the world’s leading consumers of butter, he points out. At our lowest point in the late-90s, annual consumption may have got down to about 7kg per person, but by 2011 we were back up to 20kg. In contrast, the French eat less than 8kg and also consume less red meat than we do.
Jackson’s argument is that if we stopped eating just butter, we could radically reduce our saturated fat intake in one fell swoop. “I’m not a low-fat advocate,” he stresses. “I’m a low-saturated-fat advocate.”
But can we be sure of the link between less bad fat and lower rates of death from heart disease? Haven’t there been other lifestyle and diet changes over the past 40-50 years? We are smoking a lot less, for instance. Jackson has looked into this and says the pattern with cigarette use is very different. Male smoking rates declined at the same time as the female rate increased. Meanwhile, heart disease was declining at the same rate in both sexes. “The first country to reduce smoking was the UK. It had a reduction five to 10 years earlier than us, but its heart disease epidemic didn’t start declining until 10 years after us, he says.
Although we began eating less salt in the 1950s, when domestic refrigerators meant we didn’t have to rely on it to preserve our food, that may have resulted in a reduction in blood pressure, the major risk factor for stroke, but the number of heart attacks was still rising.
As for statin cholesterol-lowering drugs, Jackson says they started being prescribed in a big way only in the early 2000s.
“I think they are the reason we’re not seeing a rise in heart disease now. People are eating saturated fat, but they’re also taking their statins.”
Fewer processed foods
So, how should we be eating in 2017? Jackson is a fan of the Mediterranean diet, which has plenty of science to back it up.
“We should have a moderate-fat diet that is low in saturated fat, lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, wholefoods and good carbs [not the white, starchy ones). There’s nothing wrong with lean meat and some dairy, just don’t eat the refined stuff. And we should be eating fewer processed foods because it’s easy to hide lots of calories and refined carbs in them.”
It is not hard to tell whether a fat is saturated. If it’s solid or semi-solid at room temperature, as are coconut oil and butter, then it should be avoided.
Jackson admits he loves the taste of butter. He even eats it once or twice a month, usually at a restaurant. “It’s a treat food, like ice cream, and people need to start thinking of it that way,” he says.
“There is no way they should be eating it on a regular basis.”
Buttering us up
TV chefs and marketers are laying it on thick about butter’s supposed virtues. But the facts haven’t changed.
By Jennifer Bowden
Butter fans reason that it is more natural than margarine, so must be the healthier option. But there’s more to this debate than meets the eye.
For decades, nutritional scientists have recommended we replace butter, a rich source of undesirable saturated fats, with vegetable-derived oils containing healthier, unsaturated fats.
However, celebrity food shows and the trend towards eating more-natural products have led to a resurgence in butter demand. Dairy co-operative Fonterra has seized on the change with renewed promotion of butter, and Lewis Road Creamery and Westgold New Zealand have launched premium butter products.
Sales are certainly leaping ahead in Australia, too. According to Roy Morgan Research, butter last year overtook margarine as Australians’ spread of choice. Ongoing media debate about the health benefits or otherwise of butter versus margarine isn’t making matters any clearer for consumers. Last June, for instance, journal PLOS ONE published the results of a review by researchers from Tufts University in the US, which found butter consumption was “only weakly associated with total mortality, not associated with cardiovascular disease and slightly inversely associated (protective) with diabetes”.
Scientist Laura Pimpin said: “Even though people who eat more butter generally have worse diets and lifestyles, it seemed to be pretty neutral overall.”
That suggested butter may be a “middle-of-the-road” food, she said. So, healthier than the sugar or starch of white bread or potato on which butter is commonly spread and which have been linked to higher risk of diabetes and heart disease, but “a worse choice than many margarines and cooking oils” that are rich in healthy fats such as soybean, canola, flaxseed, and extra virgin olive oils, and which would probably lower risk compared with butter or refined grains, starches and sugars.
Yet news headlines largely missed a “worse choice” than margarine and vegetable oils in the health stakes. Time magazine, for example, wrote that, “the case for eating butter just got stronger”.
Mainstream news reports also missed the fact that the study didn’t specifically compare butter with olive oil or margarine in terms of disease risk, as was pointed out in Nutrition News, a Harvard School of Public Health publication. By default, the Harvard title wrote, that turned it into a study of how butter affected chronic-disease risk as compared with the rest of a typical Western diet containing a variety of healthy and unhealthy foods such as refined breads, soft drinks, processed foods and red meat.
In other words, the Tufts’ study found butter was as unhealthy as a standard Western diet of largely processed foods. In contrast, a 2015 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology assessed the effect of replacing energy from saturated fat with equivalent energy from polyunsaturated fats, monounsaturated fats or carbohydrates from whole grains and found a 25%, 15%, and 9% lower risk of heart disease, respectively.
It also found that swapping 5% of saturated-fat energy for the same amount of refined carbohydrates and sugars did not alter coronary disease risk, reinforcing the point that saturated-fat-laden butter is as unhealthy as a diet full of refined carbohydrates and sugar.
Butter may require less processing than margarine, but it is a less-healthy choice than vegetable-derived oils including margarines. If health is a priority, choose plant-based oils and margarines.
Myth buster
An expert dispels the anti-margarine myths.
Margarine is one molecule away from plastic, it was originally developed as an animal feed and it increases cardiovascular-disease risk – these are just some of the many claims made about margarine. We examine the evidence for each of these claims with expert advice from oils and fats specialist Dr Laurence Eyres, chairman of the Oils and Fats Specialist Group, a division of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, and a retired Food Standards Australia and New Zealand Board member. Eyres has worked in the food industry for both butter and margarine manufacturers.
1. Margarine was originally developed as an animal feed
Margarine was invented in 1869 by Frenchman Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès in response to a competition sponsored by Emperor Napoleon III, who wanted a cheap, tasty substitute for butter that would store well on ships. Butter was expensive and in short supply at that time. Mège-Mouriès won the Emperor’s competition with his margarine, which was a big hit in France. Its popularity eventually spread across Europe and through the Western world.
2. Margarine is one molecule away from plastic
A nonsensical statement, according to Eyres. “It’s like saying methanol is similar to ethanol, when we know ethanol is safely consumed in alcoholic drinks but methanol ingestion causes blindness and death. It’s nonsense.” Many organic compounds, such as fats, are formed from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. And many have similar constructions. Nonetheless, a one-molecule difference is substantial in scientific terms.
3. Margarine is high in trans-fatty acids and increases cardiovascular disease risk
Margarine was originally manufactured by hydrogenating vegetable oils (adding hydrogen to the vegetable oils to solidify them), a process that produced significant quantities of trans-fatty acids. Scientists then discovered trans-fatty acids increased cardiovascular disease risk. Clearly, limiting our trans-fat and saturated-fat intake is a good idea. However, margarine-manufacturing technologies have since changed substantially; Australasian manufacturers removed trans fats about 15 years ago, says Eyres. Margarine and spreads are now produced by interesterification (introducing an enzyme) and blending with unsaturated liquid oils. Consequently, most vegetable-oil-based margarines contain almost no trans-fatty acids and relatively low levels of saturated fats. What’s more, most of the products we refer to nowadays as margarine are actually a spread, says Eyres. By law, margarine has to be 80% fat, whereas products containing less fat than this are called spreads. Most of the products in the supermarket contain about 65% fat, says Eyres. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a margarine in the supermarket; they’re all spreads.” Spreads can provide cholesterol-reducing blends of unsaturated oils and plant sterol esters.
4. Margarine doesn’t decompose at room temperature, whereas butter does, proving margarine has no nutritional value
Not true, according to Eyres. Margarine is microbiologically more stable and doesn’t decompose as quickly as butter because it doesn’t contain milk, he says. Milk is a source of protein that micro- organisms thrive in. Hence butter, which contains protein, will decompose more quickly than margarine at room temperature. Eyres points to the Heart Foundation’s advice on butter, on its website, for a well-balanced view on the use of butter versus margarine. The Heart Foundation notes that, “while using small amounts of butter every now and then shouldn’t be a problem for most people, the clear, unequivocal evidence remains that there are far healthier fats for our heart. It is better for our hearts to replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats. Making the simple swap from butter to margarine spreads is one way to do this.”
This feature was originally published in the January 28, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener
