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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Vegetable oils are derived from seeds such as canola/rape, olive, sunflower etc. Milk is extracted from the breasts of lactating cows. Both are rich in fats and calories. Both have been done for thousands of years. Both are emulsified to form blocks.
Different seeds have different nutritional profiles, and some are considered better for health than others.
There seems to be some popular memes knocking about which suggest that the obesity epidemic is caused by “seed oils” and seed oil products, and not simple overeating, underexcercising, and consumption of highly processed junk.
Food science is complex, “doing your own research” is not listening to a few people on YouTube. Like all things, the devil is in the details.
One of the big health risks with fat is that it builds up inside blood vessels and narrows them, causing health problems like high blood pressure and heart attacks.
Fats are divided into two classes, saturated and unsaturated, which build up in different ways. To simplify a bit, saturated fats are long straight molecules which build up in dense deposits (like a handful of spaghetti) whereas unsaturated fats are branching molecules which form loose fluffy deposits (like a brush pile), but there isn’t a consensus on which of these is actually worse for your health. In the 1990s, saturated fats were considered bad and unsaturated fats in seed oils were promoted – now opinion seems to have reversed.
It’s very hard to study the effects of these, because which type of fat you tend to eat is probably determined by your overall diet and lifestyle, which can have a lot of other effects (if, for example, rich people eat more butter and have better healthcare – the healthcare is keeping them alive longer, not the butter) so it’s hard to isolate just the effect of saturated Vs unsaturated fats with no other variables.
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