If you have margarine in your fridge, you’re going to want to read this. In this blog, I’m going to be comparing margarine brands with real Organic Valley butter.
We’re going to look at Country Crock, Smart Balance, Earth Balance, and several vegetable spreads.
You’ll be a little bit appalled when you understand the process of making a vegetable spread.
You may be trying to avoid butter and saturated fats, but is it actually benefiting your health?
There was an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study that looked at 350,000 people over a 23-year period of time and found no association between eating saturated fats like butter and heart disease.
That’s a rock-solid study in a very prestigious journal. So is saturated fat the problem, or is it our overall bad eating, processed foods, and toxic lifestyle?
Country Crock
Country Crock is touted as 28% vegetable oil, but I don’t know where they get that.
The front of the package will say something like “friendly for cholesterol” or “heart-healthy,” depending on the front of this.
Never read the front of a food—always go to the ingredient label.
The front says 28% vegetable oil spread, but there’s no vegetables in it. It does have soybean oil, which is usually genetically modified.
Ingesting something that has altered DNA could create an issue with your DNA.
It has palm kernel and palm oil, which are fruits, so I don’t know where they’re getting ‘vegetable’ from.
There are also a lot of other emulsifiers and flavorings, which could be dangerous.
If a product with flavorings is from a reputable company or has certifications, I’m okay with it, but it’s something you have to be careful with.
There’s also soy, a couple of synthetic vitamins, beta carotene, vinegar, salt and purified water, which I’m okay with.
72% of this is water, salt, colorings, flavorings, preservatives, and additives.
How is that logically better for our heart than something that comes from nature in the form of butter?
Smart Balance
This buttery spread says that it supports healthy cholesterol levels that are already in a normal range, so always look at the fine print.
It’s also touting a whopping 400 milligrams of omega-3. This is going to be more of a plant-based ALA form of omega-3.
The omega-3 types that you want in order to lower inflammation are EPA and DHA.
There’s nothing wrong with ALA in general. However, when it comes in a plant-based form, it is very delicate. Any sort of heat exposure turns it rancid.
If you heat it too much, it starts smoking, and that’s how you know it’s gone rancid.
You’ve changed the chemical makeup of the oil, and you need to pour that oil out and start over.
That’s the type of oils that are in these vegetable spreads. The ingredients list contains a vegetable oil blend of olive, canola, and palm oil.
I’ve covered canola oil a lot because it comes from rapeseed and is very high in omega-6s.
Palm is a middle-of-the-road oil.
Olive oil can be fine, but the problem with it is that olive oil imported into the United States from around the world is often blended with other oils.
Then you get the rancidity because it’s not pure olive by itself. That’s why you want to look for an olive oil that has one origin and is cold-pressed.
Now, this also contains less than 2% of salt pea protein, natural and artificial flavors.
Artificial flavorings are chemicals that can wreak havoc on allergies, neurological symptoms, brain health, and focus, especially in children.
So be wary of any type of artificial flavoring.
This also contains less than 2% of lecithin, vitamin A, beta carotene, monoglycerides, vegetable fatty acids, emulsifiers, potassium sorbate, and EDTA.
I want to go into what potassium sorbate and EDTA are, because they’re unacceptable in places like Whole Foods.
Potassium Sorbate
Why is the potassium sorbate such a problem? Potassium sorbate inhibits the growth of mold, so that’s why they use it as a preservative.
However, it’s a mild skin and eye irritant and has the potential to mess with our DNA.
In fact, in one study, potassium sorbate was clearly seen to be genotoxic to the human peripheral blood lymphocytes, or white blood cells.
In another study, it was found to be mutagenic, meaning that it’s linked to DNA-damaging activity.
Why does it keep ending up inside of our food supply?
Well, the spread would go rancid because it’s made with rancid oils, so they put the preservative in there.
EDTA
EDTA is very common, so it’s a good one to know. You might spot this in many other foods because EDTA is used so often now.
It’s a stabilizer preservative, which has a foaming action to it, but it’s also a chelating agent, which means it’s used to precipitate out metals.
That’s bad when it comes to your food because it’s a penetration enhancer.
This doesn’t mean it penetrates the skin or penetrates your digestive tract very easily, but it enhances other chemicals to do it.
By eating EDTA, you’re essentially calling a locksmith to open some doors so toxins that normally couldn’t get through can now get into your system.
That’s what EDTA does, and that’s why you should avoid it..
Not only is it a chemical, but it’s going to help other chemicals cause more damage inside of the system.
Earth Balance
This is a so-called healthy, organic version of a vegetable spread. It’s non-GMO and vegan, so at least they’re trying to pay attention to those things.
It has a USDA \-certified organic symbol on the front, which is good.
But even if all that stuff is there, there could be something bad in the ingredient label.
Earth Balance is made with a vegetable oil blend of palm, soybean, and extra virgin olive oil.
I like the olive oil, but it’s made from the exact same stuff that we saw in the Smart Balance.
Soybean usually has a high chance of being genetically modified. This is organic, so it probably isn’t, but could still have an estrogenic effect on the body.
Canola oil is very high in omega-6, even if it is organic. That will be very inflammatory to the body. It takes half a year just to get this out of your system.
It’s congestive, and these types of oils just sit in your body, bog down cells, and clog up the system.
There’s natural flavor, which is all right since the product is organic and non-GMO.
It actually has defatted soy flour, which has more estrogenic flour added to it.
That’s going to work against testosterone in men by exposing them to extra estrogen.
That extra estrogen could also have an impact on menopausal symptoms for a lot of women.
It also contains lactic acid and annatto extract, but I have no problems with that.
However, this has inflammatory oils, and even if most of the other ingredients are clean, we are getting a high exposure to soy.
We have to read ingredient labels to understand if it’s going to make you inflamed, make your insulin go up, or help you reach your health goals.
This one doesn’t build health. It has less of an impact than Smart Balance or Country Crock, but it’s still not building health.
Organic Valley Unsalted Butter
With all of these problems, we just go back to butter, right? Now, if you’re a vegetarian, then you’re in a very tough place, especially if you’re vegan.
But on the front of Organic Valley Unsalted Butter, there are labels for pasture-raised cows, a USDA organic symbol, and non-GMO symbol.
You can get this with or without salt, and usually they use sea salt.
The package also says that their farms never use antibiotics, synthetic hormones, pesticides, or GMOs.
This only has two ingredients: organic sweet cream and lactic acid.
This means no unnatural oils that are high in omega-6; it’s going to be saturated fat.
It’s going to be a source of omega-3s, especially if the cow was not inflamed.
The more bad omega-6s and grains the cow is fed, the more inflamed it’s going to get, which is going to end up in you.
In this scenario, there’s no antibiotics, synthetic hormones, pesticides, or GMOs, so we know the cow didn’t have that problem.
Now, there are several good butter brands out there, and I don’t have a tie to Organic Valley specifically, but these are the things I look for.
If you need some help understanding a way around the grocery store, check out this video where I take you to the grocery store and shop for butter.
