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
Fat molecules, regardless of vegetable or animal, look like three long strands, tied together at one end. The strands can be of different lengths, and some of them are straight, and some have one or more kinks, and all the different animal and vegetable fats contain several kinds of such strands in differing proportion.
Plastic (Polyethylene, more specifically) contains the same kind of strand, but exclusively straight ones, and much longer, and not in bundles of three. So, yes, fat is similar to plastic, but not that similar, and also that applies to all fats, not just margarine.
The health benefits of vegetable fats over animal fats come from some of the kinked strands. Making margarine however involves a process that straightens out some of the kinks (because the kinked strands melt at lower temperatures), so you lose some of the health benefits. The process also carries the risk of producing strands that are kinked the wrong way (“trans fats”), which are extremely unhealthy, but afaik modern production methods are largely able to filter those out.
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