Have you watched the TV program “Amazing Race” where teams race from city to city? Same deal here, but we’re inside a supermarket. We started in the cereal aisle and then moved to the bread aisle, searching for foods that met our health criteria of whole grains plus more natural fiber than added sugar. Unfortunately, only a few products passed our test. Finding healthy foods outside the produce department isn’t that easy.
Today we’re in the butter aisle. At least I think of it as the butter aisle, but it’s mostly soybean oil. It’s a strange world, not as simple as I thought: there are 72 different products offered. This seems like marketing trickery: instead of offering a few healthy products at good value, there is a confusing jumble of stuff of unknown healthiness. Butter and hydrogenated margarine products are at opposite ends of the aisle, glaring at each other over the tubs of “spreads”. Spreads? Spreads are the new name for what we used to call soft margarine.
Butter: There's a good feeling to the butter section. The companies are old, venerable. Challenge Dairy Products has been in business since 1911; their Danish Creamery brand has been around since 1895. Things are simpler here; butter is mainly sold salted in cubes. You can also buy it unsalted, whipped, or organic (Horizon Organic, or Wild Harvest). The ingredient list is refreshingly short for butter. Prices range from $4.49 for the store brand to $8.78 for Plugra European Style Butter, but most brands are around $5.00 a pound. This could be all you need except some are allergic to milk products or are avoiding saturated fats (a topic for another day). Land O’ Lakes is a cooperative offering butter but also blends it with olive oil, or canola oil (which gives an omega-3 label claim). Life’s good in the butter section; the local Henry's even has natural cream from pasture-fed cows.
Margarine: Margarine was a bad idea that hung around for a century. The soft margarines were highest in trans fats and they have pretty much disappeared. The hard margarines have trans fats too, but less, so they are still sold. How much trans fat? It ranges from 1.5 to 3.0 grams per serving. Several brands claimed “zero” as allowed by the FDA but the ingredient list said “hydrogenated” so this suggests they just have less than 0.5 grams. The Institute of Medicine recommends that we eat no trans fats so why are these products still offered? Because some poor person will buy them—they sell at rock bottom prices, as low as $.99 per pound for the store brand. Some day we’ll address why the supermarkets stopped caring about their customers.
Spreads in Tubs: The old margarines are called spreads now. In recent years a product called Smart Balance made life difficult for the bully of the spread market—the British company Unilever. (Unilever dominates with brands like Imperial, Shedd’s Spread Country Crock, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Promise, and upmarket Brummel & Brown.) What Smart Balance did was to develop a patented method to make an oil emulsion (using soybean, palm, canola and olive oils) that didn’t have trans fats and then make a big noise about their lack of trans fats. This put pressure on Unilever and forced them to abandon their hydrogenated products in 2010. They replaced them with a new process that uses interesterification to blend soybean and palm oils. Is this a healthy product? Good question; it was good enough to pass FDA requirements, but we don’t know what the long-term effects might be. On the other hand, I don’t have any information that the Smart Balance product is better—it has a long ingredient list too. Prices range from $1.39 to $3.79 for a 15 oz. container. The higher priced brands have canola or olive oil plus some synthetic vitamins added. There’s some marketing trickery in the tub products: some use terms like “buttery” or “butter taste” but they don’t contain butter.
The bottom line? I’m going to enjoy butter in moderation. If you have a milk allergy and can’t eat butter, what do you do? I don’t have an answer because I’m uncomfortable with soybean oils. Many of the soybeans grown are GMOs, most oils are extracted using the toxic chemical hexane, and there are concerns about thermal damage to the oils during processing. The industry has not been open about how they process oils, perhaps to protect trade secrets, so we don’t know enough to choose their products. Wouldn’t it be better to inform more and market less?
Question for comment: What do you use besides butter?