It has long been said that margarine is good for you because it is made from vegetable sources, as opposed to animal sources. Why the source of something matters more than the actual end product made from those sources is worth further exploration. It seems reasonable to accept that everything is made from something. Therefore the root material can be manipulated and turned into whatever we want through chemical engineering. Scientists have been proving this for years.

It seems logical to question why margarine was developed in the first place. It was discovered in 1813 by Michel Eugene Chevreul. He was intending to combine the three margaric acids found in most animal fats. This led to further research desired by Emperor Louis Napoleon III, who thought it might be fun to host a contest to find a butter substitute that could be used by the military and lower class citizens. A chemist by the name of Hippolyte Mege-Mouries came up with a substance known as oleomargarine, which in time commenced the margarine revolution still present today in the world.

So what are the actual differences between margarine and butter? What did chemical engineering do to for us, and why does it matter so much anyway? Did chemical engineering provide a substance that makes us healthier, saves us money, and is better than butter? Or did it merely make a handful of people rich, while duping society into believing they were better off using margarine instead of butter?

When placed side by side, margarine and butter remain similar in calorie count. While butter does contain a bit more saturated fat, it isn't enough to make that big of a difference in our diets. In fact, a recent Harvard study showed that margarine actually caused more heart disease in women than butter did, when eaten in the same quantity. This implies that our systems digest butter more easily than they do margarine. One of the reasons for this is that butter helps us absorb other nutrients better, something margarine is incapable of doing.

Margarine has little if any nutritional value, whereas butter comes complete with nutritional benefits. As mentioned above, it helps us absorb nutrients better, and it enhances the flavor of other foods making us more likely to eat healthier choices, providing we add a touch of butter to them. It seems butter not only helps digestion, but it enhances flavor, and taste good too. As if that were not enough, margarine increases bad cholesterol counts. It actually raises them, often tripling the risk of coronary heart disease in some people.

Aside from this, the chemical make-up of margarine has been manipulated so much that it is only one molecule away from plastic. That's right! Eating margarine is about as close to eating plastic as you will ever get, unless of course you like eating indigestible items. Some people have even gone so far as to test this, leaving margarine out for weeks at a time. It does not decay, attract bugs, or smell in any way. It simply sits there, like a plastic blob, unable to change form.

This is the real test of margarine validity. Why would anyone purposely ingest something that has been chemically engineered to the point of no return? It sits on the grocery shelves, purchased by all who have been deceived of its worth, people like you and me who bought the line that all natural butter wasn't as good as chemically manufactured plastic, commonly called margarine, and created from a contest to be a butter substitute for those of lesser importance; perhaps it should be prized and reserved only for the ones dumb enough to create this stuff and call it food in the first place.

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