Shopping for a healthy spread has become complicated. It’s no longer a simple choice between salted and unsalted butter or soft and hard margarine.
Today, you can buy spreadable butter, light butter, semi-salted butter, even butter with canola oil.
If you prefer margarine, be prepared to spend some time browsing the grocery-store spread case. Once you narrow down your choice to margarine made with olive, canola, sunflower or soy oil, you’re left to decide among spreads that are calorie-reduced, fat-reduced, salt-free, lactose-free, vegan or fortified with omega-3s or plant sterols.
The first decision, of course, is whether to use butter or margarine. For many, the choice boils down to taste preference, the type of fat used and the degree of processing.
Margarine is made from vegetable oil, so it does not contain cholesterol. It’s also higher in heart-healthy unsaturated fats – polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats – than butter. When substituted for saturated fat (found in animal foods), unsaturated fats can help to lower LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood.
Good fats aside, not all margarines are heart-healthy. Some are made with partly hydrogenated vegetable oils, a source of trans fat. Like saturated fat, a steady intake of trans fat increases LDL cholesterol. Worse, trans fat can also lower HDL (good) cholesterol, the type that protects against heart disease.
In general, the more solid a margarine, the more trans fat it contains. For example, Loblaw No Name 100 per cent canola/soybean oil margarine contains two grams of trans fat per two teaspoons.
To put these numbers in perspective, the World Health Organization recommends that we should consume less than 1 per cent of our daily calories from trans fats. For a 2,000-calorie diet, that means less than 5 grams of trans fat per day.
Some manufacturers have reformulated hard margarines to reduce trans-fat content. Imperial hard margarine has only 0.1 gram of trans fat per two teaspoons. However, this comes at the expense of increasing its saturated fat content by adding palm and palm kernel oils. Two teaspoons delivers 3.5 grams of saturated fat. Soft margarines, on the other hand, contain zero to two grams per serving.
The vast majority of soft, spreadable margarines sold in Canada are trans-fat-free.
Butter is made from animal fat and is a concentrated source of saturated fat – five grams per two teaspoon serving versus two grams or less found in most margarines. (The small amount of trans fat in butter – 0.2 grams per two teaspoons – is naturally occurring. Unlike industry-produced trans fats, naturally occurring trans fats are not considered harmful.) Even if you do have high blood cholesterol, you can still use butter sparingly if you prefer its taste. Just make sure your overall intake of saturated fat is low and you include a good source of soluble fibre in your daily diet. Soluble fibre found in oats, oat bran and psyllium-enriched breakfast cereals helps to reduce LDL cholesterol.
There’s another reason some people choose butter over margarine: its scant ingredient list. Made from only cream and sometimes salt, butter lacks the numerous additives used to create margarine. That’s appealing to people looking for food products with as few ingredients as possible.
If you like butter but don’t want all the saturated fat, try a light butter or a spreadable butter. Lactantia light butter has 25 per cent less fat than regular butter. Gay Lea’s Spreadables butter is made with canola oil, which reduces its saturated fat content to 3.5 grams per serving. The company’s light version has 2.5 grams of saturated fat per serving.
Prefer margarine? Look for one that’s non-hydrogenated (e.g. trans-fat-free) and contains as little saturated fat as possible, ideally no more than one gram per two-teaspoon serving.
