for christ's sake NHS

[lolliwillowes]

Why are you still advising people to choose low fat margarine over butter?
The entire food plate thing is a disaster, encouraging people to stay healthy long term by substituting natural fats for Frankenstein-fats.

Surely I am not BU?

Are posters trying to argue that butter is as processed as margarine.

Really? What an extraordinary argument to try to make.

I think I've missed a few steps in my undergraduate of this discussion- how have we gone from hydrogenated fats are bad (surely yes?) to vegetable oils are bad (surely not?).

Genuine- what train of thought have I missed in this discussion?

What oil should I be cooking with, please?

@Fordian

What oil should I be cooking with, please?

olive oil or butter

@knittingaddict

Whip cream/milk, you get butter.

Hardly a processed food, is it?

The whipping is the processing. Its not an ultra or highly processed food but its had a change made from its natural form. A cut up apple is a processed food.

@RandomLondoner

When I was a kid I used to refuse margarine because I thought it tasted like plastic. As an adult I discovered that their chemical formulae only differ by something like an atom

Whereas butter differs from plastic by two atoms.

OK I made that up. But I doubt that two products that have such similar properties are massively different from each other, from an organic chemistry point of view.

Ok bear with me because my 30 year old a-level chemistry is somewhat rusty and there will be REAL chemists around.

They are very different by composition. Saturated and unsaturated fats are common parlance - and in its simplest form, this is what it means.

CO2 (carbon dioxide) - carbon had four electrons and oxygen had two. That means if you join a carbon atom it “needs” two oxygen atoms to be “saturated”.

CO (carbon monoxide) is an oxygen atom short - ergo it’s unsaturated.

Saturated is like going to a dinner party full of couples.

Unsaturated is going to a dinner party with one single.

Poly-unsaturated is BEING that single on a group holiday and expected to look after all the couples’ kids.

“Shitstorm”.

Fwiw my mum was type I diabetic, was told to fill up on toast, cereal and plenty of healthy fruit juice.

I’ve struggled with my weight and have been told lots of pasta, tatties and bread (with marg natch).

One of my best friends is a medic and was taught the carbs first mantra - she truly believes it. As for the uni dietician degree - imagine the disappointment to have spent 3 years being fed BS - whatever happened to higher education encouraging independent thought?

@8dpwoah

I think I've missed a few steps in my undergraduate of this discussion- how have we gone from hydrogenated fats are bad (surely yes?) to vegetable oils are bad (surely not?).

Genuine- what train of thought have I missed in this discussion?

Why are vegetable oils fine but not margarine (made from vegetable oils)?

What's the significance of margarine being one molecule away from butter? How different are the chemical compositions of butter and margarine? They both contain hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Plastic contains carbon and hydrogen. I suppose they are similar in the same way margarine and water are similar..

I’m thoroughly confused now. I thought the olive oil was healthy when used cold but not so good for you when heated:
www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-olive-oil-good-for-cooking
Whereas rapeseed oil has a high smoke point and so is supposedly healthier to cook with
www.jamieoliver.com/features/change-to-rapeseed-oil/

tbh, this thread is reminding me why I like UPF so much. Long live them in my diet. And carbs. mmmmmm yum.

YANBU

Marg is the devil's own spread.

Butter all the way here.

NHS does need to seriously look at diet advice. Tis poor.

Because it takes at least 10 years to change mainstream thinking, the best example of this is the immediate clamping & cutting of umbilical cords. It's been NICE guidelines to delay for at least 60 seconds since 2015, but most places still do it. So likewise the 'low fat/high healthy whole grain' thinking will remain for at least another 5-10 years too. Deeply frustrating.

@XenoBitch

Surely it should be anything, but in moderation?

Define "moderation"?

I think we are getting confused between processed food (that could be an apple cooked) and HIGHLY processed foods - ones which have a lot of ingredients not found naturally (synthetic colours, flavours and things to make it a certain texture) and which have been round the factory. Also it might have some unwanted additives in the form of pesticides, maybe some things to preserve it. Basically its stuff our prehistoric ancestors, or even someone from 1800 might not recognise as food. That's a good litmus test.

Highly processed means more weird stuff the body might not really want/need and its had a lot of messing about with before it reached your plate. That's how I view it.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of posters think that most of any margarine is hydrog fat.

it's not. Modern margarines are rarely based on hydrog fat nowadays.

There is emulsifier, monodiglycerides, in margerine, or store-bought bread, monodiglycerides have some transfat in them. This is fair point.

Red meat also has some (naturally occurring) transfat in it.

Anyway, cream cheese or Lidl rye bread count as UPF, if you assume any minority ingredient (such as malt extract or added starches) 'ruins' the food by making it into UPF. I gather that pasta sauce now counts as UPF. If avoiding UPF means worrying about those foods then ... meh. I won't be a member of that purist club.

I'm currently a dietetics student. I've thought that govt. 'good food plate' has been massively outdated for years. I remember it from home ec. classes in the 90s.
One of the things we've learned so far on the course is that it takes YEARS for official advice to change based on the results of research.
The recent decision to add folic acid to flour in the U.K. has been a long time in the making.
One of our lecturers was telling us about research that she was involved in which had been ongoing for decades, and the end result has been the addition of one sentence to a piece of legislation, but it should have a significant impact on public health.

Margarine is a dirty word in my house and it haven't used it in about 20 years, not since I started obsessively reading food labels and wondering what the eff all of those ingredients in margarine were, never mind the processes used in creating those ingredients.
Butter is delish.
Butter is processed - in that it has been changed from its original form - this is true of any food that's not in its original state, and that can be a simple change in its physical state, eg. cooking/freezing/dehydrating are all forms of processing.
Processing isn't necessarily a bad thing - it can make foods last longer (important for storage and therefore - historically - survival), more digestible, increase bioavailability of some nutrients.
What matters is the degree of processing - how far removed the end product is from the source product. So butter = churned cream with salt = YUM! Margarine = extracted (sometimes with solvents) & treated vegetable oils, with added chemical preservatives to prolong shelf life & prevent oils going rancid, added colours (to resemble butter) etc. etc. = NASTY!

This might be interesting to some:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3t902pqt3C7nGN99hVRFc1y/which-oils-are-best-to-cook-with

I didn't know vegetable oils were so bad for you, but I only ever use it to fry eggs, which we rarely eat. I use refined olive oil for frying, butter in some dishes and sometimes groundnut oil. I might ditch the vegetable oil completely now. I didn't get on with the taste of rape seed oil.

It's a shame they don't have coconut oil in the test. I've never been entirely convinced about it's health claims or eco friendliness.

YANBU
Margarine tastes like plastic

The whipping is the processing. Its not an ultra or highly processed food but its had a change made from its natural form. A cut up apple is a processed food.

Ok, it's processed, but only slightly and with no nasties.

Yanbu.

I'm firmly of the belief that full fat foods are infinitely better for you, whether dieting or not. Fat helps make you feel full (along with protein) and a little goes a long way.

And re salt, I've always craved it by the bucketload. Blood pressure on the low side of normal - I reckon if I didn't eat so much my BP would be dangerously low! 🤣

Completely agree with you. I only use butter or oil. I never buy any dairy that's is labelled zero fat. Its all about eating as natural as possible and avoiding added sugar. Never felt easy with yoghurt that's zero fat. Usually full of additives

Make your own butter if you're worried about processing. I'd rather have a bit of butter than loads of marg.

So if the NHS guidelines are out of date, where can we find the latest recommendations for diet? Is there anywhere trustworthy?

As I said NHS dietitians are not as portrayed on MN. I'm sure some will disagree with the lower fat options mentioned here (as do I personally and I don't push them professionally either!) www.bda.uk.com/resource/healthy-eating.html Quite balanced and common sense IMO