what’s the deal with vegetable oil vs. butter? Is butter actually healthier?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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