Do you leave it out?

[GoodGame]

I use oil of Downtown.

 

[Abegweit]

Hey there Lucy, haven't talked to you in forever!

It pleases me very much to be learning the difference between margarine and butter from you.

I'll have to try buying butter when I go grocery shopping next. I use margarine to sautee mushrooms & onions from time to time, wonder what that'd taste like with butter..

link

Here’s how you make butter:

Milk a cow.
Skim off the cream.
Add salt.
Churn the cream until it’s thick and chunky and tastes awesome.

That’s a food Mother Nature would indeed recognize. So how is margarine made? Well, that depends on who you ask. One pro-margarine site describes the process this way:

Farmers grow seeds.
The seeds are harvested.
The seeds are warmed and crushed to extract the oils.
Other ingredients are added to keep the margarine fresh.
Color and flavor are added.
The mixture is cooled to make a smooth margarine spread – perfect for cooking, baking or spreading on your sandwich.

Heck, that doesn’t sound too bad. Gather up some seeds grown right out there in the Great Outdoors, warm them by the wood stove, crush them to extract the oil, flavor it, cool it, and you’ve got margarine. No wonder Mother Nature couldn’t tell the difference.

Now here’s a slightly more detailed description:

Farmers grow seeds.
The seeds are harvested.
The seeds are crushed to extract some of the oil.
The rest of the oil is extracted by mixing the seeds with hexane, a chemical solvent.
The hexane is (supposedly) all removed.
The oil is pumped full of hydrogen gas and nickel powder. (Even the margarine makers know hydrogenated oils are a tough sell these days, so they may skip this step. I don’t know what, if anything, has replaced it.)
The remaining oil is subjected to heat and high-pressure CO2 gas.
The oil is mixed with sodium hydroxide and passed through a centrifuge.
The oil is mixed with water and passed through another centrifuge. At this point, the margarine is a gray, speckled, oily mass that doesn’t smell so good. So …
The oil is mixed with hydrated aluminum silicate that binds to and filters out the unwanted pigments.
The mix is heated again and the oil is extracted.
The oil is passed through a steam distillation chamber to remove unwanted odors.
Yellow food coloring and artificial flavors are added.

Yummm …

BTW, my butter stays in the fridge. But that's largely because I don't eat bread.

 

[Abegweit]

Better to cook with Olive Oil too... much much better for you.

Bzzt. Wrong. You've been listening to too much propaganda. Not only does butter have better cooking properties, it's also healthier for you. Your body is made of saturated fat. Why would anyone think that an essential component of life is unhealthy? It's astonishing to see the nonsense which today's junk scientists manage to put over on people.

BTW, the reason that olive oil contains unsaturated fat while your body contains saturated ones is due to the melting point of the fat. It should be above it inside your body. Since you are warm-blooded you choose high-quality structurally-stable fats. The tree, in contrast, has to go with stuff that, while weaker, is liquid in mediterranean climates. Tropical trees, like people, use the good stuff.

 

[Rashiminos]

Bzzt. Wrong. You've been listening to too much propaganda. Not only does butter have better cooking properties, it's also healthier for you. Your body is made of saturated fat. Why would anyone think that an essential component of life is unhealthy? It's astonishing to see the nonsense which today's junk scientists manage to put over on people.

BTW, the reason that olive oil contains unsaturated fat while your body contains saturated ones is due to the melting point of the fat. It should be above it inside your body. Since you are warm-blooded you choose high-quality structurally-stable fats. The tree, in contrast, has to go with stuff that, while weaker, is liquid in mediterranean climates. Tropical trees, like people, use the good stuff.

Not that my opinion is valued highly around here, but I don't disagree with the above. If I could find a suitable package size, I might even move up to lard (I'd be the only one eating it, so I can't get too much at one time).

 

[Zelig]

Better to cook with Olive Oil too... much much better for you.

Depends what I'm cooking.

Bzzt. Wrong. You've been listening to too much propaganda. Not only does butter have better cooking properties, it's also healthier for you. Your body is made of saturated fat. Why would anyone think that an essential component of life is unhealthy? It's astonishing to see the nonsense which today's junk scientists manage to put over on people.

BTW, the reason that olive oil contains unsaturated fat while your body contains saturated ones is due to the melting point of the fat. It should be above it inside your body. Since you are warm-blooded you choose high-quality structurally-stable fats. The tree, in contrast, has to go with stuff that, while weaker, is liquid in mediterranean climates. Tropical trees, like people, use the good stuff.

Eh? Pretty much all the evidence I've seen points to olive oil being pretty healthy.

 

[Abegweit]

Not that my opinion is valued highly around here, but I don't disagree with the above. If I could find a suitable package size, I might even move up to lard (I'd be the only one eating it, so I can't get too much at one time).

Lard is AWESOME. Simply the greatest foodstuff that ever existed. And an utterly incredibly great cooking ingredient.

Unfortunately it makes a mess of your kitchen. Spatters everywhere.

 

[Abegweit]

Eh? Pretty much all the evidence I've seen points to olive oil being pretty healthy.

Sources?

Incidentally, you did not address my point. Saturated fats are healthy because that's what you are made of.

 

[Zelig]

Sources?

Incidentally, you did not address my point. Saturated fats are healthy because that's what you are made of.

Your point about saturated fat doesn't interest me, since there's so much evidence pointing to olive oil being healthy.

I don't know that I should really have to post sources for this, it's pretty common knowledge.

Here are a couple, I'm sure there are more if you search pubmed, these are just the ones sourced from wiki:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3776973
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17321749

Edit: I'm not really interested in an argument here, if you've got good sources about olive oil not being healthy, I'd be interested to see them, otherwise I'll be moving on.

 

[ZeletDude]

My family leaves it out, its very convenient,.

 

[Abegweit]

Your point about saturated fat doesn't interest me, since there's so much evidence pointing to olive oil being healthy.

I don't know that I should really have to post sources for this, it's pretty common knowledge.

Here are a couple, I'm sure there are more if you search pubmed, these are just the ones sourced from wiki:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3776973
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17321749

Edit: I'm not really interested in an argument here, if you've got good sources about olive oil not being healthy, I'd be interested to see them, otherwise I'll be moving on.

I did say not that olive oil was unhealthy. I said that saturated fats are healthy because that's what you need to construct your body from. Natural unsaturated fats are good fuel for your metabolism but they don't build up your body. As for your links, don't ever give me a .gov link. Ever. I do not have any interest in thieving liars.

 

[kochman]

Bzzt. Wrong. You've been listening to too much propaganda. Not only does butter have better cooking properties, it's also healthier for you. Your body is made of saturated fat. Why would anyone think that an essential component of life is unhealthy? It's astonishing to see the nonsense which today's junk scientists manage to put over on people.

BTW, the reason that olive oil contains unsaturated fat while your body contains saturated ones is due to the melting point of the fat. It should be above it inside your body. Since you are warm-blooded you choose high-quality structurally-stable fats. The tree, in contrast, has to go with stuff that, while weaker, is liquid in mediterranean climates. Tropical trees, like people, use the good stuff.

You are wrong, according to Donald Hensrud, M.D. of the Mayo Clinic.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/food-and-nutrition/AN01037

Choose MUFA-rich foods such as olive oil instead of other fatty foods — particularly butter and stick margarine — not in addition to them.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The general consensus in the medical community is that things like saturated fat, LDL cholesterol, and hypertension are bad for you, but there are reasons to seriously doubt the many of studies on which the consensus is based. Nearly all the studies that led to recommendations against them were not clinical but observational studies (which tend to confirm anything considered common knowledge, because people who take care of their health tend to follow mainstream recommendations), and they did take into account confounding factors like sugar consumption. The government in particular rushed to endorse specific recommendations despite knowing that the evidence was far from conclusive, because men like McGovern thought it was important to be seen taking quick action.

 

[Zelig]

I did say not that olive oil was unhealthy. I said that saturated fats are healthy because that's what you need to construct your body from. Natural unsaturated fats are good fuel for your metabolism but they don't build up your body. As for your links, don't ever give me a .gov link. Ever. I do not have any interest in thieving liars.

If someone is going to consider pubmed worthless, I'm going to go ahead and consider his or her posts and opinions worthless.

You are wrong, according to Donald Hensrud, M.D. of the Mayo Clinic.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/food-and-nutrition/AN01037

Again, I'm interested in actual studies more than short blurbs by random doctors.

 

[kochman]

Just use the google button on your computer and you can find them...
Or don't.

No skin off my teeth.

Edit: I must be pitching this because I work for the olive OIL industry... therefore I must be an evil capitalist maniac...

 

[timtofly]

My kids suggest switching to peanut butter.

 

[LucyDuke]

I'm not sure I know anyone that uses it as a spread (my grandmother used to, but doesn't anymore, and other than that I've never seen anyone use it as one). Might be an American thing.

Edit: Apparently 56% of the 97k tonnes of spread sold in Australia in 2009 was margarine, with 22% being butter, and the other 22% being other dairy blends. Given that most people would own butter, but use it in cooking, rather than as a spread, that probably means a lot of people are using margarine as a spread.

By the sound of it, not using butter on your bread is probably more of an Australian thing than using it is an American thing.

 

[MjM]

Saturated fats do get a bad rap. However, too much of anything is bad for you, be it butter, olive oil, margarine, or even broccoli. Variety is the spice of life.

 

[Simon Darkshade]

I often leave butter, lard, dripping and bacon fat out of the electric refrigerator on the sideboard during the day or overnight during the winter months.

 

[LucyDuke]

Saturated fats do get a bad rap. However, too much of anything is bad for you, be it butter, olive oil, margarine, or even broccoli. Variety is the spice of life.

Show me the study that says too much broccoli is bad for you. I don't mind pubmed being .gov.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Broccoli does contain goitrogens, so too much of it could make you deficient in iodine and cause thyroid problems.