I saw a video talking about how nature will reject a block of margarine, like bugs and stuff won’t eat it. But if you put a stick of butter out it will be eaten in hours. Is that just an unsubstantiated internet claim for controversy sake, or is that really the case?
Later, I read somewhere that recent studies found regular users of butter experienced reduced levels of cancer compared to regular users of vegetable oil. I don’t have these studies, but I’d also like to know if that’s a truthful claim or not as well. Thanks.
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Butter has a lot more nutrients.
Both are pure calories.
I would consider butter to be better for you simply because at least you’re getting more nutrients in the deal.
Vegetable oil is a huge category of oils. Many oils like olive, coconut, and palm oil have great health benefits while others like corn and soybean oil less so. It depends.
Veg oil is super processed, weird potential plants or mechanisms.
Butter a pure natural, very low processed thing.
Margarine a frankenfood
Scientific data is very easy to cherrypick. There have been a great many studies on a great many things and statistics can be used in such a way that you can interrogate a particular data set to make it say basically anything you like if you’re good enough. Imagine just flipping through a library and picking out all the ones where the villain is called Dave, and using that to prove that all people called Dave are evil.
I do not know how true the first claim is. Butter and margarine aren’t expensive so it’s something you could do yourself if you wished. Be aware that animals eating things is not a measure of it’s nutritional impact – the slugs in my garden will devour Basil instantly but won’t touch Rosemary. This doesn’t mean rosemary is toxic in any way to humans.
Studying human nutrition is incredibly hard because we eat so much, and we’re terrible at remembering what we ate, and unlike mice you can’t just lock groups of people up and feed them one thing. To really prove butter doesn’t cause cancer but veg oil does, the gold standard would be to get one very large group of people to only eat butter, and one very large group to only eat veg oil, and another very large group to consume neither. This is impossible. Instead we typically look at big groups, ask them in a survey “What did you eat yesterday” and generalise that what they ate yesterday reflects their whole diet. Foods typically get bucketed into large categories; e.g. butter would go in “Dairy”. Scientists then do statistics until they find some interesting pattern.
You must be **very** skeptical of *anyone* making any claims that “X causes Y” because very often it hasn’t been demonstrated in humans. It might cause something in a worm, or a cell, or a mouse, but they’re not people.
Certain things, we have unequivocal proof they do cause cancer in real people living their lives – the Sun, alcohol, asbestos, and so on. These things have decades of absolute proof in real people, and a firm mechanical basis. Other things, like, infamously, Aspartame, we have some mechanical reason to suspect it *can* cause cancer, but we only see it occur in models when given unrealistic exposures or only under specific experimental conditions.
Speaking only about the margarine/butter and bugs part.
Margarine is made by mixing vegetable oil with water and a powder to make it stick together, on the other hand, butter is made by whipping the cream that floats to the top of fresh milk. When both get exposed to natural enviroments, butter will decay and emit the smell signature (because of the milk) that will atract bugs faster and more efficiently than hidrogenated oil with some chemical added to make it smell like butter.
Butter is the fat in milk binded together so it gets all the good nutrients trapped into it as it clumps together and is separated from butter milk
Margarine has to be 80% fat, other than that I don’t think it matters on nutrients such as vitamins or protein found in butter
Vegetable Oil is usually extracted from pressing produce to extract the unsaturated fats and certain vitamins come through in this process
Everything in moderation but overall butter is usually the better choice, vegetable oil is been found to be linked in higher LDL (bad cholesterol)
The easiest way I could think of this is that oil burns longer, or in other words is harder for the body to burn so the oils end up deposited in your blood vessels where butter will be deposited on hips and gut as fat cause the body was able to process it more efficiently
One oil doesn’t equal another. I wouldn’t say using butter instead of olive oil would be healthier. Many studies show health benefits of olive oil. Palm oil, soybean oil or margerine on the other hand… especially margarine which was first developed as a cheap butter substitute for poor people and is a man-made product.
Not too long ago butter was seen as the ‘unhealthy’ choice, mainly because the type of fat it contains is high in cholesterol and clogs the arteries over time if consumed excessively. Here enters the “healthy” alternative, margarine.
Margarine is a low cholesterol spread similar to butter and cheap to produce, and was marketed and seen as the healthy alternative to butter. So what’s this new trend with people who avoid seed / vegetable oils then, aren’t they considered healthy because of low cholesterol??
The problem lies in the fact that vegetable and seed oils (canola, vegetable, palm etc.) are very, very, very far from being “butter” in their natural state. The oil has to be processed many times, bleached, cooked and re-cooked over and over again to turn it into a scentless, buttery paste. Every time the oil is cooked it breaks down into carcinogenic polymeric molecules similar to plastic. The long-term effects of eating plastic and carcinogenic materials are only now starting to show itself, and the consensus has returned to butter being the healthier alternative, because it’s much easier to control your cholesterol than it is to gamble on eating large amounts of carcinogens.
Edit: [here’s a good image](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FxnVwnfWIAUfqcO?format=jpg&name=small) of the whole process. Note that ‘Degum’, and ‘Deodorize’ are forms of cooking, and ‘Refining’ is a chemical additive. Everything goes through a process to be made, but this is unreal for producing food. Usually these processes make things like soap or cleaning chemicals that aren’t supposed to be eaten. You will also cook the oil at home on top of all of this.
I would be careful about taking anything regarding “vegetable oil” (also known as seed oil) at face value. There is currently a bit of a craze among health nuts online about “the dangers of seed oils,” much of which is unsubstantiated. Every decade we have a new craze by said health nuts and generally later it turns out to be unsubstantiated. These are the same people that demanded non-fat foods over a false premise that fat was the primary driver of obesity.
The big difference between the two is the kind of fats they have. Butter has what we call saturated fat, oil has unsaturated fat, this is related to how their chemistry works.
The chemistry of them is different, but the general trend is that saturated fat has more energy and its molecules are more straight, the molecules being straight means it is easier to arrange into a solid, so saturated fats like butter and lard come in solid form, unsaturated comes in liquid form.
Because saturated fats have more energy per molecule/weight, they are usually animal fats since we need to carry our fat everywhere we go, while plants don’t and like the liquid properties of unsaturated fats.
Because saturated fats come from animals rather than plants, they are usually much more expensive. Margarine was invented to solve this problem (making cheap vegetable oil into something spreadable), it uses a process called hydrogenation to turn unsaturated fats into saturated ones, though its history is tainted by the creation of dangerous trans fats (this is largely no longer an issue however).
**Generally there is a agreement in the science community that all else being equal, unsaturated fat is better for you primarily to prevent heart disease.** Ignoring some complexities regarding cholesterol for a second, you can think if it that since saturated fat is more likely to solidify, its more likely to solidify in your blood vessels which causes all sorts of problems, biggest being heart attack if it blocks the blood vessels which feed your heart. Unsaturated fats simply stay liquid in your body and don’t get jammed.
This analysis does not include the other things found in oil/butter though. While it is mostly fat, not all of it is.
>Later, I read somewhere that recent studies found regular users of butter experienced reduced levels of cancer compared to regular users of vegetable oil. I don’t have these studies, but I’d also like to know if that’s a truthful claim or not as well. Thanks.
In my view, the general opposition to seed oils, at it root comes from poverty. Even beyond a general belief that what the poor eat is bad for them (something true to some extent but not an absolute).
Vegetable oils are mostly cheap, beside a few like avocado oil and olive oil, its the cheapest cooking oil you can get. Poor people, generally use vegetable oil for cooking for this reason. Poor people are also more prone to all sorts of disease (among other things cancer), all sorts of other reasons, including the food they eat. But this does not mean everything they eat is bad for them.
Your study can be simply explained by butter eaters being richer than vegetable oil eaters and being more likely to do all sorts of other things that cause less cancer. Could be things even completely unrelated to diet like working outside jobs and wearing sunscreen. Could even be related to oil itself, one currently understood case is that reusing any sort of cooking oil more than a few times causes carcinogens to arise, richer people will swap the oil out or not eat at fast food places that are particularly notorious for reusing oil.
The people that oppose “seed oils,” do not oppose all seed oils actually, they will tell you other seed oils like olive oil and avocado oil are good for you. These are also unsurprisingly the more expensive oils richer folk tend to buy.
When our body stores excess as fat, it does so in the form of saturated fat. Somehow that won the evolutionary lottery.
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