Earth Balance vs. Butter?
Colin Murphy | Sep 21, 2010 | Comments 17
If you are a vegan or anti-saturated fat, you’ve probably sought out alternatives to butter. Earth Balance, a popular alternative, is a “natural” spread of expeller-pressed oils “shown to raise good cholesterol while lowering bad.”
Use this so-called food for any purpose — every diet and every customer. Take a look at the latest ad for another butter substitute, Country Crock, and you’ll learn it “has 70 percent less saturated fat than butter.” Paired with a slice of whole grain toast, a banana and low-fat milk, it will make up the perfect breakfast for your kids, says the commercial.
But what’s truly better for you, Earth Balance or old-fashioned butter? Beyond personal health, how do these products impact social justice and the planet? Vegans and “plant-based diet” folks will trumpet “Earth Balance, of course!” It has much less ‘artery-clogging’ saturated fat than butter. Omnivores, meat lovers and moms cooking traditionally would probably say, “Butter, because my family’s been eating it for generations!”
It makes sense to weigh both from a historical perspective. According to The Nibble, butter has been present in human diets for about 4000 years, mostly in colder northern latitudes where it spoils less quickly.
It has long been a staple of many civilizations, even serving as a potent fuel source. Ghee, or clarified butter (butter reduced entirely to its butterfat), has held sacred status in India as a symbol of purity for 3000 years.
But wait. If butter’s bad for you, why would one of the oldest civilizations on Earth praise ghee? Why would the French, one of the world’s most eager consumers of butter and other animal fats, have one of the world’s highest rates of people living past 100 in the world? Shouldn’t citizens of both countries be dropping dead from clogged arteries with all the butter they consume? Let’s continue our investigation.
Earth Balance and Country Crock, in contrast to butter, are not so time-tested. In fact, their predecessor, margarine, has only been around since the end of the 1800s. It was in 1869 that French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouries responded to Louis Napoleon III’s call for an affordable butter substitute for those who did not live off the land.
Mège-Mouries invented margarine, which now appears in its trans fat-laden form. Trans fats, by the way, are not found anywhere in nature Đ chemists invented them with a complex process called hydrogenation Ń hence all of the nasty hydrogenated and partially-hydrogenated oils you’ve likely heard about. In medical literature, there is no doubt whatsoever that trans fats seriously damage the human body, causing heart disease. The only boon from the trans-fat boom has been to the profits of the food industry companies that use them.
Country Crock and Earth Balance, two of the most recent descendents in the margarine family, tout themselves as healthful. But can we trust these so-called “foods” if they’ve only been around for decades? And what about the lifecycle cost of butter and vegetable oil spreads?
If the degree of processing is any hint at a food’s nutrition, as author Michael Pollan suggests, then butter wins out bar none. In most cases, butter has just one ingredient: cream, which is sometimes salted. Granted, the resource cost for butter is intense, at 21 pounds of milk to produce a single pound of product.
Earth Balance, however, has 11 ingredients. It has the dubious “natural flavor,” which Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser thinks is neither a flavor nor natural. It’s a man-made food additive, a chemical. This is the first Real Food Red Flag.
Aside from soy lecithin and annatto, two ingredients our bodies had never encountered before the 20th century, Earth Balance features a “natural oil blend” of palm and soybean oils. Sounds smooth, doesn’t it? It really rolls off the tongue. As the industry knows well, that’s what sells.
On one hand, we’re left with Earth Balance and its food additives and massive processing. On the other, butter and its time-tested blend of a few ingredients and less distant production, yet with an inefficient conversion of resources to final product. Which is the winner this round? You be the judge.
Filed Under: Features
Wow, lots of misinformation here. Apparently nobody who writes articles bothers to do any research anymore. Firstly, Earth Balance doesn’t use hydrogenated oils. Secondly, Earth Balance doesn’t have any trans fat. I do entirely agree that natural is often better, but if you think the butter you’re buying in the supermarket is “natural” or in any way superior to this processed product (which I personally avoid as much as I can since I try to avoid anything with palm oil due to that industry’s destruction of natural rainforest), you should probably do some actual research on the problems with butter too, which are far more numerous.
Of course, the antibiotics and host of chemicals that find their ways into most cows used for butter production were also “not encountered by our bodies before the 20th century.”
So if it’s going to be butter, maybe choose wisely?
I was checking into info on Earth Balance because a woman (expert) on Dr. Oz Show last wk was promoting Earth Balance. “Better than butter” she said. I thought, isn’t that hydrogenated oil?…which is trans fat & clogs arteries & I’ve heard & read it can also cause Alzheimers Disease. Maybe Dr. Oz or his experts should check further. I just use olive oil & sometimes(rarely) butter.
Man made product touted as whole food product makes no sense to me especially if you have dairy allergies. The product has some dubious ingredients that can bring a whole set of new problems for those with allergies!
Hmmmm having it bothways…well i think he is really saying that he Earth Balance has some strange ingridients and at the same time touting it as wholesome food.
To me he makes sence. In the last 20 years i have been hearing a lot of ppl complain of dairy alleries. A d ifyouhave allergies introducing earth balance or some other man made “butter” could bring a whole hosts of problems. Use common sense.
The better question Linda would be why would someone with dairy allergies be trying to eat foods that contain them?
Ghee is lactose free! The milk solids are removed in the process of making the ghee. It’s the solids that have lactose in them, not the oil.
I have the true allergy to milk protien so even the oil has it in it, so I can not have ghee.
Ghee is the staple of Indian diet. Indian men have the highest death rate from atherosclerosis [hardening of the arteries]
As the daughter of a woman with Celiac’s Disease and the mother of two boys who have dealt with or are dealing with dairy and soy allergies (I was dairy and soy free while nursing my first), I can attest to how isolating a food allergy can be, especially around large family dinners and play dates, and surrounded by remarks like, “we never worried about what we ate when my kids were younger. We just didn’t think about these things.” (I’ve written this off to ignorance)
So, since my second son’s first birthday is tomorrow, and I’d like to give him the same first taste of a sweet baked good that I did with my older son, I’m baking a cake, something that almost always contains dairy and/or, using some substitutes and a new recipe because I’m trying to make this the same kind of first birthday any other kid could have….so, that’s why. Sure, I won’t be giving him foods that would normally contain dairy all the time, but this one time, I think it’s worth it.
So if you have dairy allergies what do you use in place of butter. Some foods just taste weird when cooked in olive oil or coconut oil?
Thanks for this post! It’s so hard to let go of habits. The butter habit might be easy if you’re vegan but for earth balance..not so much. The best thing I have found to do is just eat whole foods. When i’m in the mood to bake and I keep on weighing what kind of fat to use, I just give up and say..I’ll have an apple!
Thanks, Colin, for a great article! It’s disturbing that anyone would possibly think a man-made food (and not just margarine) is better than a food made by God or “The Universe.”
not to be a party pooper, but your argument (I paraphrase because your writing is fairly inaccessible) says in one sentence “there’s no way to know the scientific and health impacts of something like margarine, since it’s just been invented” and then moments later “we all know the many negative effects of hydrogenated oils – something that’s just been invented”. Unfortunately, you can’t have it both ways. On the plus side, you can have butter and earth balance in the same meal. And it’s up to you…
The ‘resource conversion’ argument is misleading and inaccurate. That assumes that the rest of the milk is wasted, when in fact the main product is skimmed milk, which has a huge market and lots of different applications.
The writer simply stated “the resource cost for butter is intense, at 21 pounds of milk to produce a single pound of product.” The point the writer was probably trying to make is that it takes a lot of milk to get enough cream to make a pound of butter. It is a given that the milk is not thrown out.
Earth Balance takes the cake. The yummy, vegan cake.