A Dose of Health

Butter gets a bad rap, but in my book I’ll pick butter over margarine any day.

I used to buy into the ‘margarine is better than butter’ hype, but no more.  Trans fat free and low in cholesterol spreads such as Promise and I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter, Country Crock and a host of others have a long list of ingredients.  Have you ever checked it out?

Here’s the list for Smart Balance Buttery Spread:

Ingredients

NATURAL OIL BLEND (PALM FRUIT, SOYBEAN, CANOLA, AND OLIVE OILS), WATER, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF SALT, WHEY (FROM MILK), VEGETABLE MONOGLYCERIDES AND SORBITAN ESTER OF FATTY ACIDS (EMULSIFIERS), SOYBEAN LECITHIN, POTASSIUM SORBATE, LACTIC ACID (TO PROTECT FRESHNESS), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, VITAMIN B6, VITAMIN B12, VITAMIN D, VITAMIN E (DL-?-TOCOPHEROL ACETATE), BETA-CAROTENE COLOR

You can find this listing on the Smart Balance website.

Butter:

Now, I’ll go to my refrigerator and pull out a stick of butter and read the ingredients as follows:

Cream, Salt, Milk

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the stuff I can pronounce over what I can’t any day.

Not only does butter taste better and makes things it interacts with taste better, but the ingredients are common every day ingredients.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a spare jar of VEGETABLE MONOGLYCERIDES AND SORBITAN ESTER OF FATTY ACIDS sitting around on my pantry shelf.

The Healthy Goal

I know, I know, butter is full of saturated fats and its ‘bad’ for us.  Well, since the goal is to make healthy choices one choice at a time, if given the option between margarine and butter, I choose butter (olive oil would be better, but that option is not on the table at this time).

So, if eating butter means that I have to make one extra lap around the block or vacuum with a little more vigor, so be it.  I’d rather have cream, salt and milk in my system than the host of ingredients that are listed on the margarine label.

Additional Reading

While doing a little research on butter, I came across this document entitled Ingredients for Margarines and Spreads.  Not quite sure what it all means, but I know after skimming through the document, I’m even more adamant about choosing butter over margarine.

My daughter decided that she wanted to have a sleep over birthday party. It was a last minute thing so the preparations were done quickly. We decorated downstairs, came up with a theme and invitations went out the week of the party (it really was a last minute thing).

I ordered pizza and picked up a cake and ice cream from the local store.

It wasn’t until after the party was over that I happened to read the ingredients in the cake that I realized that I was killing my daughter and her guests. I almost called each of the parents to have them take their daughters to the local hospital to have their stomachs pumped, but I realized that was overkill.

Here are the first three ingredients listed on the cake container:

• Sugar
• Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil
• Enriched Wheat Flour (it wouldn’t need enriching if the manufacturers used whole grain flour instead)

YIKES! The total trans fat grams per serving: 3 grams. That’s right, 3 grams of trans fat per serving. The 10” round white cake was supposed to squeeze out 26 servings (according to the nutrition label).. That means that each piece of cake should have been cut .38 of an inch thick to get away with consuming only 3 grams of trans fat (ONLY 3 Grams!) per serving.

I probably should have given the girls a plastic bag to eat as it had the same nutritional value as the cake.

Lesson learned, no more last minute parties. It’s detrimental to the health.