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Butter and margarine both exist to make things tastier.
You put them on toast, or when cooking or baking. They give that delicious, fatty flavor that animals love.
Looking at what they’re made of is where some of the story changes.
The ingredients in butter are simple. We all know how it’s made. It’s just cream and water.
But margarine is a recent invention, as recent as the 19th century, whereas we’ve been making butter for millennia.
It’s made from plant oils and fats, not animal ones, which means it requires a lot more processing.
Margarine came about under Louis Napoleon the III in 1869, when he wanted to find an affordable alternative to butter that had a longer shelf life and could feed the army and the working class.
The original margarine used beef fat, and plant-based margarine came long during the Great Depression.
It’s pretty similar to butter in the way it behaves, but its use of hydrogenated plant oils creates tons of trans-fats and improves its shelf life. These aren’t necessarily bad things, except that we now know much more about trans-fats than we used to, such as its negative effects on cholesterol.
Your body needs fat of course, but it needs different fats than the ones in margarine, and in butter.
Saturated fats are found in butter. They’re not as good for you as unsaturated fats, but they’re natural and they’re not as bad for you as trans fats.
Trans fats, or processed fats, appear in partially hydrogenated oils—that is, the stuff that makes junk food taste so good. Margarine has this in spades.
But in the 1960s, when margarine was popularized, the leading science was that it was saturated fats that were causing heart disease, not trans-fats, and butter got a bad reputation.
Now, we’re discovering that saturated fats may be less to blame than we though, and that a low-fat diet may not be all it’s cracked up to be. And when it comes down to it, choosing between butter and margarine is just a choice between saturated fats and trans fats, natural and unnatural.
When in doubt, go for the natural choice. Butter at least has some nutritional benefits, where margarine doesn’t really have any.
