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Is butter an unhealthy food?
In this era of more and more attention to health, people's choice of food is becoming more and more demanding. Many things we used to eat were labeled as "harmful to health" overnight, including butter. Many health experts say that butter contains a lot of trans fatty acids, which is not good for health. So, is butter really as evil as the news says?

According to archaeological data, the use of butter by humans began as early as BC. At that time, people have discovered the high-grade beverage of milk, but the preservation of milk has always been a headache. By chance (it is not clear exactly what kind of opportunity it is), people found that if fresh milk is stirred, it will be layered, and after filtering out some water from the upper layer, this part of the liquid will become yellow, almost solid and easy to preserve, which is butter. 1877, German engineers successfully designed an original butter batch processing machine. 1879, engineers from Sweden, Denmark and Germany developed a thin cream separator which can continuously produce butter, laying the foundation for butter production. Since then, the mass production of butter has become popular all over the world.

Modern nutrition research has found that butter is mainly composed of triglycerides, diglycerides, monoglycerides and free fatty acids, and also contains a small amount of phospholipids, cerebrosides, sterols, fat-soluble vitamins and so on. It can be said that butter is a kind of food with high fat content. So it is reasonable to say that eating too much butter is bad for your health, but it is really unfair to say that the trans fatty acid content of butter is particularly high. Trans fatty acids are not natural butter made from milk, but margarine made from vegetable oil.

Margarine was first invented by French chemist March Morris. There was a great demand for butter at that time, but there was a serious shortage of natural butter. People urgently needed a substitute, and the invention of margarine shocked the world at that time. In recent years, with the development of science and technology, the technology of margarine has become more and more advanced, but one thing is the same-the starting material of margarine is not milk, but various other oils, such as butter, whale hardened oil, coconut oil, rapeseed oil, peanut oil, etc., which originated in France. Nowadays, sunflower seed oil and soybean oil are mostly used; The United States used cottonseed oil and lard, but now it uses soybean oil, cottonseed oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil, sunflower oil and safflower oil. The process of producing margarine is probably to put oil, all fat-soluble additives, water and all water-soluble additives in a container, stir vigorously, and then cool quickly before oil and water are separated, so that the condensate similar to butter produced is margarine.

Margarine has no problem in manufacturing process, and even we can supplement nutrition by adjusting the types of added substances. However, before making margarine, some manufacturers will pretreat vegetable oil, such as hydrogenation, to adjust its physical and chemical properties and make it more suitable for the next production. In this process, unhealthy substances such as trans fatty acids may be produced. Therefore, butter (natural butter) is a kind of food with high fat content. Eating too much is not good for your health, and margarine is the little devil of trans fatty acids mentioned in the news.