Decent Margarine Quest

Mojisola

"On the other hand, butter naturally contains trans fats, as well as saturated fats."

Flora is being economical with the truth here. The natural trans fat in butter is CLA which does not behave in the body like the factory produced trans fats.

champys

Hawthorn wrote: »

What about an olive oil one? I seem to recall olivio was nice enough? And is it benecol that actually helps reduce cholesterol? Haven't tried that one though.

My DH uses one of the cholesterol-reducing spreads, but I don't think it has much of an effect, really. As for myself, I'm with abaxas and never use anything at all between the bread and the filling - have never done since childhood, as I couldn't stand that slippery layer (my mum used to despair about me at the time!).

Cholesterol is tricky though, and we have found with DH that however perfect we are in using no 'bad' fats and virtually no fat at all, the result of his annual blood test seems to remain unchanged! He is not at a risky level, but just above what's normal. So as long as it doesn't go up, fine. But I am really at a loss what else he could do to reduce it..... apparently this can be a genetic thing.

moanymoany

Thank you to everyone for helping. DD uses Pure and I don't like that. I think I'll go with the nothing and occasional butter.

LittleTinker

Its all hype generated to keep the general public on their toes and gets em to buy certain things costing more money....so better for the economy.

Butter is a natural product that doesnt contain any chemicals, e-numbers, additives etc etc......whereas everything else does!

It seems like a no brainer to me?

Ben84

Trans fats are produced inadvertently by the hydrogenation process, they're basically fat molecules that took on a random undesirable shape, which results in the body being unable to digest them. Any product containing hydrogenated fats is potentially going to contain some trans fats.

It's a legal requirement in the UK that hydrogenated fats be labeled as such on the packet, and nutritional tables often include trans fats, which are usually stated as zero or trace - although I'm not sure if this is also a requirement.

It was hard to avoid a while ago, but now there's loads of hydrogenated fat free products. Many things have been reformulated to get rid of them due to bad publicity. Supermarket own brands actually tend to be better than branded goods. It's not always true, but I find big brands tend to be worse at consumer information, labeling in general and the quality of ingredients used.