Butter or Margarine: What Is The Difference?

Posted by Shrikant Sharma on April 10th, 2018

If you love butter in your mashed potato, on your slice of bread, or bun, you might be guilty while eating the buttered food out of your plate. Or you may feel in a dilemma to choose you between butter and margarine or another spread.

It is good to be informed that margarine contains the good or unsaturated fats such as monounsaturated fats and also polyunsaturated fats. This is because it is crafted from vegetable oils. These kind of fats go a long way towards lowering overall LDL or what we know as low-density lipoprotein. This is also bad cholesterol in absolute common terms.

Butter has higher levels of saturated fat since animal fat is used to create it primarily. This is amongst the key trans fat foods.

However, there are some margarines which do contain levels of trans fat. In usual cases, the trans fat content goes higher in case of the margarine being absolutely solid. In this case stick margarines are the ones with considerably higher levels of trans fat as compared to the tub variety. However, it should be noted that margargine trans fats are usually considered less harmful.

Trans fat foods come with saturated fat content which leads to an increase in the levels of blood cholesterol. This also scales up overall risks linked to heart disease. Trans fat also reduces the levels of HDL or high density lipoprotein which is also called good cholesterol. As a result, liquid or soft margarine is advisable for consumption in this case.

You should ideally seek out a spread for daily use which does not have any trans fat content. This should also have low saturated fat levels. While looking at various such products, the Nutrition Facts section should be carefully read. You should ascertain the weight (net) of the trans fat and saturated fat in question. You should lower the amount that you regularly use in order to slash more calories.

In case you already have higher levels of cholesterol, talk to your own doctor about the right spreads that you should make use of. Nutralite margarine has a higher water percentage as compared to other products. This ensure that it has lower fat and calorie counts and it has lower levels of margarine trans fat as compared to regular varieties. This will boost your efforts to reduce cholesterol levels.