Butter or margarine?
Donald Gould
The butter mountain must be threatening to engulf the dairymen. How else can anyone explain, in these hard times, the Butter Information Council's vast expenditure recently on four full page advertisements in all the dailies? Moreover, they were knocking advertisements, aimed at wrecking the reputation of margarine, and implying it is an unnatural, savourless, chemical mishmash, devoid of virtue. And when hucksters behave like politicians, promoting their wares by denigrating the competition, you begin to suspect that they are feeling the draught.
The advertisements were, of course, only the latest shots in a battle which has been going on between the butter merchants and the margarine moguls for a number of years, and were remarkable simply because they were louder and ruder than earlier exchanges.
In the good old days, before they declared war, the two sides were able to get along together well enough. Butter graced the tables of the prosperous, while the poor made do with marge. The markets hardly overlapped. Then the great heart disease debate began. Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the biggest killer in the Western world, and in Britain almost 100 men below retiring age die of it every day. Heart attacks are caused by patches of fat-like material which form on the inner surface of the coronary arteries which supply blood and oxygen to the unresting muscle of the heart. Clots are liable to form on the rough, fatty plaques in the diseased vessels, and When a clot does form, obstructing the blood flow, the muscle beyond the blockage is badly damaged. The whole heart may be thrown into confusion, fluttering instead of Pumping properly, and the result is sudden death. Or the victim may survive the immediate sickeningly painful accident for some hours, or some days, or he may recover, as many do, to enjoy a comfortable old age, or he may later suffer a second or third attack, for the underlying fatty degeneration of the coronary vessels remains.
Anyway, it is a nasty business, and such a major threat to health and survival, that When, following the end of the Second World War, the extent of the epidemic had become recognised, a massive hunt was mounted for the cause. During the Fifties it became established that people with a high level of cholesterol in their blood are particularly prone to heart attacks, and it was assumed that lowering the blood cholesterol would lessen the risk. This can be done by reducing the quantity of saturated or animal fat in the diet, replacing it by socalled unsaturated fats. Butter is animal fat. Some margarines, made from vegetable oils, contain a high proportion of unsaturated fat.
This presented the manufacturers of the right kinds of margarine with a wonderful opportunity to expand their market by flogging their products on health grounds, thus capturing the custom of the more prosperous who had previously never dreamed of spreading their bread with anything but butter.
In this country Van den Berghs, owned by Unilever, make Flora margarine, largely from sunflower seeds, and for 15 years or more the company has been one of the most vigorous propagandists for the view that sticking to unsaturated fats will save you from sudden death. However, British advertising rules prohibit claims that this or that will improve your health (even the 'Guinness is Good for You' slogan fell foul of that stem proscription). Therefore Flora advertisements have only been able to suggest obliquely that the product is the elixir of life, and to state that it is 'Higher in polyunsaturates than any other spread, with no animal fats at all' without explaining why those facts should make it worth eating.
So the game has been to educate the British reading public to appreciate the meaning of the facts that can be advertised, and to that end the Flora Information Service was established in 1971. This agency spends a lot of money ferrying journalists to far-flung places to eat and drink and meet members of the medical establishment who support the death-from-fat-in-diet theory. San Francisco has not been thought to be too far away, and I did hear that a clutch of eager hacks had even reached Japan. I only got as far as Finland. The idea is, of course, that the journalists will come back home and pass the message on.
I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Finland, and have had a soft spot in my heart for Flora ever since, although I am a butter man myself. Magnus Pyke was with us. We were taken there because more people die from coronary heart attacks in that starkly beautiful country than anywhere else on earth, and because this was said to be due to the Finns' boundless appetite for animal fats. We were to observe the workings of a government campaign to wean them from their selfdestruction habits.
We were treated to a number of serious discourses from physicians who had much to say about the blood levels of this and that in patients who had been subjected to that and the other dietary regime, and I am sure it was all very interesting. But I have forgotten what they told us, and can only remember a visit to a sausage factory. The Finns are addicted to sausages, which, unlike ours, are tubes of almost pure fat. They have sausage kiosks in their town squares, where we would sell cigarettes or soft ice-creams. But the two proprietors of this particular sausage factory had both suffered their statutory early-middle-age heart attacks, and, enlightened by the health authorities, were striving to placate a wrathful fate by turning out, as part of their range, the first low-fat Finnish sausage in the world. Their factory produced 400 kilometres of sausages a year.
Now, you might think that, backed by the saturated-fat-cholesterol theory, Flora would have won the argument without difficulty, but, unfortunately, it is only a theory, and for every expert who supports it, there is another who denies that what you eat affects your heart. The Butter Information Council has not been slow to latch on to this fact. Thus, for example, a couple of years ago I attended the Fourth International Symposium on Circulatory Diseases (that is what it was called) after receiving a press invitation through the post. This impressive-sounding affair was staged by 'The European Organisation for the Control of Circulatory Diseases', which sounds even more impressive when contracted to EOCCD, because the initials have a fine official Common Market ring about them. There were a number of respectable scientists brought to the podium, but they were all managing to suggest that we should carry on eating lots of butter and bacon and eggs and drinking pints of milk, and one or two even went beyond the realm of medical science by pointing out how bad it would be for the farmers if we suddenly cut down on our consumption of animal fats. Of course the whole thing was staged by the dairy industry, but I am sure that even some of the eminent speakers did not realise that.
In 1976 the Royal College of Physicians produced a report urging people to cut down on animal fats. Two years later the Department of Health published a paper rejecting this advice. The truth is, of course, that nobody yet knows whether the kind of fat we spread on our bread makes any difference to our chances of surviving into old age. (There is some evidence, of which I heartily approve, that a couple of glasses of red wine each evening ward off heart attacks.) Meanwhile, and until we have the matter sorted out, it is absurd that the butter and margarine lobbies should pretend to an understanding they do not possess, and we should take no notice of either of them.
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