How are margarine and solid vegetable fats made? Are they bad for health?

Question

I’m from a country where margarine and solid vegetable fats (shortening and vegetable ghee) are widely produced and consumed, children used to eat slices of bread with margarine outside and TV advertorials were bombarded with margarine commercials.

It’s said that there are only one molecule of difference between plastic and margarine, and no insects won’t settle on margarine when a piece of it are left outside, and solid vegetable fats are harmful for health.

What’s the truth about margarine and solid vegetable fats and the whole margarine vs. butter battle? Are the claims I wrote in the previous paragraph (plastic and no insects) any true? Are solid vegetable fats bad for health?

In: 145

Answer 1

Old school margarine (possibly still common in some countries) was made from excess soybean oil originally. The oil would be extracted, filtered and then put into a chamber where very hot hydrogen gas would be bubbles through it. This would ‘saturate’, or straighten out the fatty acid chains by adding hydrogen to the kinks. This lets the fatty acids pack more closely together and lets the oil be solid at room temperature.

Now the original stuff when saturated would be 1) rancid from being superheated, 2) smell gross, 3) be a weird grey colour, so following hydrogenation the newly made solid would be bleached and deodorized so it looked white and odourless. Then margarine was (originally) sold with a packet of yellow dye, or (later) coloured yellow in the factory. Sometimes diacetyl would be added to give it a more buttery smell and taste.

Issue with this margarine is that hydrogenation can straighten out the fats in two ways, 50/50 shot: cis and trans. This type of trans fat doesn’t exist in nature and our bodies DO NOT handle it well, with just a couple grams a day massively increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke and other illnesses. Never ever eat synthetic trans fats. There are ‘trans fats’ in dairy called conjugated linoleum acids, those are fine – but the hydrogenated stuff is poison.

More modern margarine generally uses plant oils that are solid at room temperature (like coconut or palm oil), mixed with liquid oil, flavours and colours to make it look more buttery and give it the right consistency.