Step 4. Replace butter with margarines and healthy oils

Butter or margarine? 

We get asked this question all the time, and the answer is simple – margarine.

Butter is often seen as more natural (an image helped by some slick marketing) and therefore healthier than margarine.  But just because something is “natural”, doesn’t mean it is necessarily healthy.  

For Kiwis, the biggest source of saturated fat is butter.  Butter is three-fifths saturated fat, whereas margarine (or table spreads as they are now called) contains less than one-fifth saturated fat. So making the simple swap from butter to margarine spreads is an important way to reduce saturated fat intake. Other healthy options to replace butter on bread include hummus, peanut butter, mashed avocado, pesto, or salad dressing.

What are healthy oils?

Fat (and oil is virtually all fat) is made up of a mixture of three main types of fat:

• Saturated
• Polyunsaturated
• Monounsaturated

Poly- and mono-unsaturated fats are good for your heart, whereas saturated fat isn’t.

One type of fat will often dominate in a particular food. So, for example, animal fats like butter or meat fat which are solid at room temperature contain more saturated fat. Vegetable oils (other than palm and coconut) which are liquid at room temperature contain more poly- or mono-unsaturated fat.

For your heart’s health, it’s best to choose foods or oils with more mono- and polyunsaturated fat and less saturated fat.