Americans Dump Margarine, Return to Butter

Everything old is new again.

Butter's shifting fortunes also reflect the vicissitudes of thinking on healthy eating that rattle the national diet. Families for decades opted for vegetable spreads because of concerns about butter's high concentration of saturated fat, only to be told more recently that the trans fats traditionally contained in margarine are just as unhealthy. Many Americans also have altered their thinking on how important reducing all fat is for controlling weight.

...

Courtney Shanower, a 33-year-old pizza-restaurant owner in Sugarcreek, Ohio, said she grew up in a family that bought tub margarine. "I didn't use butter for a long time because I was weight conscious," said Ms. Shanower, a mother of two. "When I turned 30 I started thinking about osteoporosis and calcium and thought I'm not getting the nutrition I need. So I stopped counting calories, and started thinking about nutrition."

In reference to the section in bold above, there was never any need to eliminate saturated fat due to health concerns, because there is no correlation between saturated fat and heart disease.

...the new research, published on Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, did not find that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat had more heart disease than those who ate less. Nor did it find less disease in those eating higher amounts of unsaturated fat, including monounsaturated fat like olive oil or polyunsaturated fat like corn oil.

...

The smaller, more artery-clogging particles are increased not by saturated fat, but by sugary foods and an excess of carbohydrates, Dr. Chowdhury said. “It’s the high carbohydrate or sugary diet that should be the focus of dietary guidelines,” he said. “If anything is driving your low-density lipoproteins in a more adverse way, it’s carbohydrates.”

As for trans fats, like margarine...

The researchers did find a link between trans fats, the now widely maligned partially hydrogenated oils that had long been added to processed foods, and heart disease. But they found no evidence of dangers from saturated fat, or benefits from other kinds of fats.

You can read a lot more details at the link.

Government agencies, like the US Department of Agriculture, and non-governmental organizations, like the American Heart Association, badgered Americans into replacing natural saturated animal fats (like butter) with artificial trans fats derived from oils extracted from vegetable seeds (like margarine) because the vegetable-based oils were supposedly healthier.  Now it turns out that the animal fats the USDA and AHA demonized (and continue to demonize) have no effect on heart disease, and the trans fats they pushed cause heart disease.

The USDA and AHA also badgered (and continue to badger) Americans into adopting low fat, high carbohydrate diets, and it turns out that excessive carbohydrate intake causes heart disease.

The WSJ article I cited above includes a chart I found very interesting.

Source: WSJ

Compare Americans' consumption of butter and margarine with their propensity for obesity.

Source: USA Today

Now Compare to these charts from the AHA's latest report on heart health in the US.

Source: AHA

Source: AHA

Americans decreased their butter consumption and increased their consumption of margarine (as per USDA and AHA recommendations), and got fatter and suffered more heart disease.  That doesn't mean that the USDA and AHA recommendations caused Americans to get fat and suffer more heart disease, but they definitely did not prevent what they were supposed to prevent.

So much for the experts.