The margarine effect

This is an interesting discussion. Sorry, I did not yet read all of it. But there are some things I like to say. Going in different directions of the topic ...

- Is margarine bad and butter good? No, you can't say it like that. A good quality butter made from organic grass fed cows' milk cream, yes that's the best there is. But not all butters are like that. And there are so many different margarines ... The biggest problem with the margarine is the way it is produced. Even if the best oil and other substances are used to make it, there's still that industrial production. It can't be made any other way.

- Are people 'bad' because they belief things that are told / taught? Are people who 'question everything' much better? Are people stupid if they don't want to change their opinion, even though many others do? Some questions to think about ...

- How can we know the difference between a lie (or 'untruth') and truth? When can we be sure something is really true? In my opinion that's very, very difficult (or even impossible).

The artist "the oatmeal" describes "the margarine effect" exceedingly well:  https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe.

Go to his website. He is amazing.

With very sweet little illustrations, he walks you through triggering examples, and then describes how when we are presented with emotionally triggering ideas, especially ones that challenge our core beliefs, it's as if we are being physically threatened, so our amygdala kicks in.

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And, in terms of margarine versus butter, specifically, I have stirred up some opposition in my personal life from posting this first post in a thread on how to help seniors eat healthy. That first post shows a huge dunce cap as a response to a brand of margarine called "Smart Balance."  

You see, I found "Smart Balance" in my parents fridge but I didn't know it was put there by a well-meaning and knowledgeable person who meant to help. This person has been advocating a well studied/trialed/tested diet called the DASH diet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH_diet) that has been shown to reduce heart disease and diabetes. In general, it is a lower fat diet, with less butter, less red meat, less sugar, yada yada. Before I knew they had put the "Smart Balance" in the fridge, I sent this person the thread I created with the dunce cap. Oooops.

In my mind, my bias, of course, I think the DASH trials were likely **not** conducted with grass-fed organic dairy and beef - which, as I understand it, makes a huge difference in inflammatory response in the body. It's also likely that most subjects in any DASH diet study were following the typical SAD (Standard American/Western Diet) full of carbs, sugars, inflammatory fats and very low veggies before switching to the DASH diet; so OF COURSE they fared better!

So that's how I stay in my confirmation bias bubble. That, and my own anecdotal evidence that despite being overweight and in my mid-fifties, when I eat what I've learned to be an anti-inflammatory diet, including healthy, grass-fed saturated fats, I no longer have arthritis symptoms, I have low blood pressure, and no signs of diabetes or heart disease.

Have to tack onto this that a friend tried to tell me that canola oil (which is a significant ingredient in "Smart Balance" along with palm and soy oils) wasn't so bad - even sending me both a Snopes article and another link to prove it. His scientific (non-Snopes) link, however, actually said canola oil contains a toxic compound...just not very much of said toxic compound. My response was, why eat something with a toxin when there are SO many oils that are available **without** toxins? Sheesh.

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So yeah, we all have our own confirmation biases and we can find data online to support our biases. And yet science is complex and not perfect and not absolute and learning new things all the time.

Cue this article from 2013 which is also amazing, by the way:  http://nwedible.com/grassfed-vs-organic-butter-and-which-one-will-kill-you-faster/.

So now I try my best *not* to post dunce cap posts, and I do my best to avoid pushing my core food beliefs on the person who advocates the DASH diet. Plus, I am mild and supportive of family members who have gone vegan. Because you know what, it IS **really** hard to get clean food, period. Unless you know how it was grown very well. And meat, especially larger big ag produced meat, just by nature of the beast (yup, I went there), is going to have more toxins in it, even if it's organic.

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And I still wish I had a way to calm the amygdala to convince someone to be even a little bit more open-minded (a baby step to a more major paradigm shift).

Sigh....

Dietary fats make the best example of The Margarine Effect because our society's opinion is so easily changed from one side to another, sometimes as quickly as 5 years and I see people reverse their opinion.

And it's fun to look at how this happens.  Marketing.  But also less than scientific use of science to 'prove' what is true.

Palm oil is a great example as it was very quickly becoming a super-food with massive health benefits and good environmental record.  There was lots of funding in that area to prove how healthy it was (and no funding for studies that proved the opposit).  Then something shifted in the global economy.  About a year later, I got to go on a hike with some people who worked in that field - both growers and researchers.  The funding for discovering how healthy this fat was had vanished.  Studies left unpublished.  Instead, there was a lot of money available to show how evil this food was.  It became evil.  

And now it is no longer the best thing ever.  It is the worst thing to put in our bodies.

And yet, this is a variation of a traditional food that has been keeping people healthy for over five thousand years.  Like butter.  And like butter, it is healthy in the traditional form and in the traditional quantities (in moderation) but less so when taken to the extreme.

That's true for 'harmless' foods like water.  Fine in moderation, deadly in extreme.  Water intoxication


I think the idea of good vs evil, that one food can be vilified at the expense of another becoming divine is a symptom of something deeper that's wrong with our society.  We are trained to see the world in these extremes and breaking free of that good vs evil way of looking at the world is going to be hard work.  But if we can do it, we can have a lot more choice in how we live our lives.  

r ranson wrote:I think the idea of good vs evil, that one food can be vilified at the expense of another becoming divine is a symptom of something deeper that's wrong with our society.  We are trained to see the world in these extremes and breaking free of that good vs evil way of looking at the world is going to be hard work.  But if we can do it, we can have a lot more choice in how we live our lives.  

I agree completely with this. Living in the gray area between absolute good or evil, however you define those, takes work. Being in the gray area or "middle way" as some people call it, requires choices to be made, and owning the mistakes that go along with choosing wrong. It's so much easier to just pick a side and go along for the ride. But I've found that making my own mistakes is the best way to learn. Not that I don't want to learn from others. That's why I'm here on Permies. Learning about what didn't work for others is just as helpful as learning what does work.

I spent about 25 years as a researcher. It was my job to go down the rabbit hole and make mistakes in order to find what works and what doesn't. Often times something that didn't work gave me a clue to what would and I would have never found this clue without making that "mistake." It was hard at first when most of my experiments failed but I got used to it and when things worked out, it was that much sweeter.

I'm at that point in my life where red flags go off when someone tries very hard to tell me the "truth." They're usually trying to sell me something, either material or philosophical/political/religious.

The margarine effect describes the divide perfectly. While visiting family this summer I stayed in one house that used butter and one that used margarine. And while I would have preferred to not eat margarine, I followed the rule and I'll admit it's conveniently soft right from the fridge.

But the war between margarine and butter excludes the idea that there could be a third or more options, after moving abroad and switching cuisines I find my two most used fats are pork lard and sesame oil, butter is too expensive here.

Margarine is cheap but using animal fats, especially lard from rendered pork belly is even more thrifty.  I think of how hard my mum worked to drain the fat from everything she cooked, because she was told how bad it was, and now I save it.

Another trick done to us was to sell us boneless skinless meat and cartons of meat flavored salt water as "broth". But broth boxes and margarine are so easy, it's easier to go with the trends and what's available. I wonder how many people would change from margarine if it became more difficult and expensive to use than butter.

Butter is not the same anymore. Cows are being fed diets high in palm oil and it's changed the consistency of butter masking it more solid than grass fed cows. Even cream is different, I can make clotted cream from the European cream I buy in Korea, but grocery store cream in Canada wouldn't clot.

I'm probably damned by whatever fat I choose, factory farmed pork lard rendered at high temps, canola oil, imported butter full of who knows what. I prefer butter over margarine, but eating my sister's vegan margarine for two weeks didn't kill me either.

F Agricola wrote:Some interesting bits of psychology involved it that way of thinking. It can range from sheer pigheadedness through to complete irrational beliefs.

To take the ‘Margarine Effect’ literally:

Like a lot of people, I was diagnosed with unhealthy levels of cholesterol. So, the Quacks suggested I stop using saturated fat (butter) and move to so-called cholesterol reducing margarine.

Over a few years and subsequent blood tests, my levels actually went up, by a lot!

So, I went back to butter and ever-so-slightly modified my diet and voila, the blood chemistry improved dramatically.

Further discussions with the Quacks was revealing: science has changed their opinions and margarine is now considered VERY nasty shit.

So, the ‘Margarine Effect’ was overcome by questioning everything and conducting some basic experiments that have known margins of error.

To be fair, it’s important to realise that SCIENCE FACTS have a ‘use-by date’, they remain true until disproven. It is amazing how many people dismiss science altogether simply because it changes tact – everything evolves over time as knowledge is gained.

Maybe they weren't quacks.  Maybe it was the best they knew at the time.

Tyler Ludens wrote:How do people get raised up thinking they are perfect and never make mistakes, get confused, or don't know everything?

Hi, Tyler - I have a perspective to share on this, based on lived experience.
It wasn't so much that I thought all that about myself (though sometimes I did), but if you didn't, then I was in big, existential trouble.
This is how I think it happened, in a nutshell: the childhood environment continually removed permission to fail, question, or be wrong.

I expect there are many possible paths. I theorize about them (ultra-critical environment, or not physically safe to make mistakes, or under constant pressure to be good at ______) but can really only speak to one.

It goes something like this:
Immerse the child in a closed, high-demand culture.
The culture teaches “self is bad” (the child believes they are bad),
sets an impossible standard (the child can only be okay/safe if they are good),
and places HUGE value on other-approval (the child is only good if others think they are good, AND the child is responsible for what others think of them),
and conformity (the culture’s definition of “good” is the only acceptable definition).
Basically, there's no room for questioning or exploratory failure.

Another example:
The child is labeled “intelligent” over and over, but nuances of intelligence are ignored (i.e, some things are easy; others will take diligence or different ways of learning). The child learns they should excel at everything (they won’t), and believes “smart” is their sole ticket to success in life (it’s not).
Again, no allowance for failure.

I can attest there doesn't have to be blatant maltreatment or neglect (I had a physically and emotionally safe upbringing), and the message doesn’t have to originate from the parents, or have malicious intent.

How criticism feels: instant fight/flight/fawn/freeze mode.
There aren’t actual thoughts, but the reaction is basically, “This contrary idea casts doubt on my rightness/goodness/worthiness. My existence is now threatened. Danger! Danger!”
Definitely irrational, and I am definitely not over-dramatizing the involuntary response.
The intensity varies. Often it's a manageable inner distraction; occasionally it's a flood and I am internally only dealing with defensiveness/panicking and unable to participate fully in the interaction.

Regarding the Margarine Effect, I think when someone's identity/security gets wrapped up in an idea, any challenge to that belief can trigger self-protection.

Being “awake” (for a few years now) is amazing. Nowadays I work on choosing versus reacting. Sometimes I can even welcome unexpected practice!