Diabetes and Mindful Eating

Butter and Margarine: What Are Your Options?

By Megrette Fletcher M.Ed, RD, CDE and Michelle May, M.D.
Authors of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes

In this third post in our series about butter vs. margarine, we’re going to take a look at your choices to answer the question, “What do I have?”

First, let’s put this into context by briefly recapping the first two posts: Seeing foods as “good” or “bad” is a simplistic and problematic way to think about nutrition—especially when some of the foods you love end up on the “bad” list.

Eating mindfully is a conscious, flexible way to make food decisions that won’t leave you feeling deprived or guilty. As we started to explore in the last two posts, when dealing with a tough nutrition question like, “Should I eat butter or margarine?’, ask yourself, “What do I want?”, “What do I need?”, and “What do I have?”

What Do I Have?

While it poses many challenges, living in our current food-abundant environment also provides many options. Once you’re aware of what you want to eat and what your body needs, you can choose the types and quantities of foods that help you balance eating for nourishment and eating for enjoyment. So let’s look at the options available in the butter vs. margarine debate.

Butter

As you learned in the last post, butter is a saturated fat which increases LDL cholesterol (the bad kind). If you really enjoy it, there are three main options: “regular” butter (which may be salted or unsalted); whipped (with added air); and light butter (with air, water and 40 percent milk fat). You can easily compare the amount of saturated fat per serving by checking the label.

Ounce for ounce, regular butter and whipped butter have the same amount of saturated fat. However, because air is added to whipped butter, it’s easier to spread and has a larger volume, helping you reduce the portion size, therefore decreasing the amount of saturated fat you’ll eat. Likewise, with light butter, the added air and reduction of milk fat lowers the total saturated fat per serving.

Keep in mind that you also have the option of substituting butter with liquid oils: try dipping your bread in olive oil; use vegetable, olive, or canola oil for sautéing; experiment with using spreads like nut butters, guacamole, or hummus in place of butter. Further, if you like butter but LOVE steak, ice cream, or other saturated fat-containing foods, you may decide to forego butter in favor of one of those instead. Again, it all comes back to balance, variety, and moderation.

Margarine

If you’re open to trying margarine, as explained in the previous post, you want to limit your trans fat intake. In general, the softer the margarine, the better; this means that margarine that comes in a spray, liquid, or tub is better than margarine in stick form.

Look for margarines that clearly state “no trans fats” and check the label for trans and saturated fats. Examples include: Promise, Olivio, Smart Balance (regular or light), and Benecol (regular or light). Hint: you can find Trans fat listed on the Nutrition Facts panel; however, if the product contains 0.5 grams or less per serving, it won’t be listed. Therefore, be sure to also watch out for “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils in the ingredient list.

Some margarines have plant sterols and stanol esters added to them. Plant sterols and stanols block the intestines’ absorption of dietary and biliary cholesterol, which has been shown to improve a person’s cholesterol level. The American Dietetic Association (ADA) recommends that people who have high cholesterol get 2 grams of stanols and sterols a day.¹

As you can see from the examples below, that’s a lot of margarine so you’ll want to consider whether the additional calories are worth the benefit.

	Serving size	Sterols/Stanol per serving
Benecol Spread	one tablespoon	0.85
Promise Activ Spread	one tablespoon	1.0
Smart Balance	one tablespoon	1.7

You may find that you enjoy the flavor of these margarines and see an improvement in your cholesterol level, so using the sterols/stanol fortified margarine is a good balance of eating for enjoyment and eating for health.

Bottom Line

The key to mindful eating is awareness throughout your entire eating cycle. This includes connecting with your present eating experience, so once you’ve used the three questions, “What do I want?”, “What do I need?”, and “What do I have?” to decide what to eat, eat it in a way that allows you to mindfully enjoy your selection.

¹American Diabetes Association, Nutrition Recommendations and Interventions for diabetes. Diabetes Care. vol 31, Jan 2008, Supplement 1 s66.

The Butter vs. Margarine Debate When You Have Diabetes

By Megrette Fletcher M.Ed, RD, CDE and Michelle May, M.D.
Authors of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes

In our last post, "Is Butter Bad? Is Margarine Better?", we introduced three important questions to ask when deciding what to eat:  

What do I want?
What do I need?
What do I have?

We also explored a “liking scale” to help you consider how much your preference for a particular food will affect your decision. Of course, it’s not enough to just think about what you like; you also want to consider what you need.

What Do I Need?

While awareness of your preferences is important, don’t stop there! Next think about what your body needs by considering questions like: What are my health issues? What is my family history? What are my goals? What else am I going to eat now? What else have I eaten today? What else am I likely to eat today? How will my choices affect my blood glucose level?

With prediabetes and diabetes, health considerations are particularly important because having diabetes is a significant risk factor for atherosclerosis. When you have diabetes, you are two to four times more likely to suffer from heart disease and stroke than someone without diabetes. In fact, two out of three people with diabetes will die from these causes. While these are frightening statistics, awareness and knowledge empower you to minimize your personal risk.

What Can You Do?

Of course, keeping your blood glucose in the target range is important. In addition, you’ll want to manage your other risk factors—don’t smoke, manage your weight, and control your blood pressure and cholesterol levels. We promised to look at the butter vs. margarine debate so we’ll focus on cholesterol levels.

Know Your Numbers

As we explained in chapter 14 of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes, not all cholesterol is created equal. Therefore, you need to know your blood cholesterol numbers. Remember:

LDL is lousy cholesterol = the lower the lower

HDL is healthy cholesterol = the higher the better

Find out what your LDL, HDL, and triglyceride levels are and compare them to the following goals.

Blood Cholesterol Goals
LDL (lousy) cholesterol	Less than 100 mg/dL Less than 70 mg/dL if you have heart disease
HDL (healthy) cholesterol	Men: Above 40 mg/dL Women: Above 50 mg/dL
Triglycerides	Under 150 mg/dL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If your tests are above these goals, you may need to change your diet, increase your exercise, start medications, or try some combination of these tactics. Did you know that improving your cholesterol—LDL, HDL, and triglycerides—can reduce cardiovascular disease and associated complications by 20 to 50 percent?¹

Cholesterol levels are determined by three main factors: hereditary, activity, and dietary. Knowing your family history of high cholesterol, heart disease, and stroke is useful information. Further, understanding how eating and physical activity affect cholesterol levels is also helpful. Without going into too much detail, here’s what you need to know:

• Exercise increases HDL—in other words, it’s beneficial. But then you knew that already!
• Replacing saturated fats (typically solid at room temperature) with unsaturated fats (typically liquid at room temperature) lowers LDL cholesterol and improves the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease.

This is where your decision about butter or margarine comes in.

Butter’s Bad Rap

Butter is a saturated fat. (Remember: Saturated fat is solid at room temperature so it sits in your arteries). The American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association recommend that you limit the amount of saturated fat in your diet to 7 percent of total calories. We’re not big on counting calories (watch for a future blog post explaining why) but it can be helpful to know what your “fat gram limit” is when you’re looking at nutrition information. Since it is based on your total number of calories which will vary each day and knowing that there are 9 calories per gram of fat, that would require some math (now you see one reason why we aren’t big on calorie counting!). Instead, just estimate your average daily calorie intake and keep the following number in mind:

1600 calories = 12 grams of saturated fat
1800 calories = 14 grams of saturated fat
2000 calories = 16 grams of saturate fat

Clearly, since the recommendation isn’t “zero,” there’s room in your diet for butter if you love it! It’s not a “bad” food—but it is a matter of balance, variety, and moderation. This is what we mean when we say “all foods can fit.”

Margarine’s Muddy Past

Margarine was originally made from unsaturated liquid oils that were chemically altered (hydrogenated) to make them solid. Later it was discovered that hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils, now know as trans fats, no longer had the healthful properties of the liquid oils they were made from. Further, trans fats actually increase risk. The American Heart Association recommends limiting your intake of trans fats to 1 percent of your total daily calories (less than 2 grams per day).

Nowadays, many margarines no longer contain trans fats (hint, the softer or more liquid it is, the better). Some even have other healthful ingredients (more on that in the next blog post). It’s easy to see why this can all be so confusing!

In our next post, we’ll explore various options in the butter vs. margarine debate to answer the question, “What do I have?”

¹ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National diabetes fact sheet: national estimates and general information on diabetes and prediabetes in the United States, 2011. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011. pg 10.

Is Butter Bad? Is Margarine Better?

By Megrette Fletcher M.Ed, RD, CDE and Michelle May, M.D.
Authors of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes

“Should I eat margarine instead of butter—even if I don’t like it?”
“Is butter bad?”
“I’m confused by all of the choices when I shop for butter or margarine. Which one is better?”

These are typical questions from people with type 2 diabetes because they’ve heard mixed messages about which is better: butter or margarine? We’ll be the first to admit that there are a lot of confusing nutrition messages out there! In this three-part blog post, we’ll explore how mindful eating can help you clear up the confusion and decide what to eat.

How Mindful Eating Helps

Most eating decisions cannot be boiled down to “good” or “bad”—even when you have diabetes. That’s an overly simplistic view that doesn’t take into account your personal preferences, health risks, family history, or the quantity and frequency, and myriad other factors. The intent of learning about nutrition isn’t to restrict or perfect your diet. It’s simply to provide information in a way that’s easy to understand and remember so that you can mindfully choose what to eat.

Mindful eating helps you become aware of your options, allowing you to make a choice that balances eating for enjoyment and eating for nourishment. In Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes, we explore the Mindful Eating Cycle: why, when, what, how, how much you eat, and where you invest your energy. It takes the complex (or too often, unconscious) process of eating and gives you a new way to think about it.

What Do I Eat?

The question, “Should I eat butter or margarine?” requires further clarification. With mindful eating, answering the question “What do I eat?” can be summarized by three main questions: What do I want? What do I need? What do I have? We’ll use the butter vs. margarine controversy as an example of how the process of mindful eating can help you answer this (and any other question) about what to eat.

Let’s begin with the first question, “What do I want?”

What Do I Want?

While this question may seem surprising, awareness of your personal preferences and how they affect your decisions is critical for managing prediabetes or diabetes long term. One way to evaluate your preference is to think about your “level of liking.” Where would you put butter and margarine (or any other foods) on a scale from 1 to 10?

1= Hate
3= Don’t care for
5 = Neutral
7 = Enjoy
10 = Love

If you rated butter as a 7 or above, then your liking for butter will be really important in the decision-making process. It wouldn’t be easy to just stop using butter since that would be a painful choice, one that you might have difficulty committing to long-term. Instead, mindful eating can help you evaluate when, what, how, and how much butter you’ll use.

On the other hand, if you rated butter as a 5 or below and margarine as a 5 or above, your decision balance would shift in favor of margarine. By thinking about what you really want, you may be surprised to realize that some of the foods you eat regularly are more of a habit than a true preference.

In addition to your overall level of liking, your preferences are often situational—in other words, specific to your mood and the food. For example, you may really love butter on hot bread but don’t care whether you cook with it or not.

In the next blog post, we’ll consider the next important question, “What do I need?” and take a look at the nutrition and health implications of butter vs. margarine.