Not quite, but fat is such a big issue in nutrition today. You could say it’s a hot subject.

Because here comes yet another update on fat.

There is a way of eating (I refuse to call it dieting since there are people who eat this way regularly, no matter weight, disease or lack of disease) called LCHF, which stands for Low Carbohydrate High Fat. This way is also called Stone Age diet. It all comes down to eating the way our ancestors supposedly ate. High amount of natural fat, low amount of grains, starch and sugars.

Unlike Atkins LCHF is about eating only natural fats, this means what you get from your animals or nuts and seeds, LCHF is also about eating organic food, no synthetic sweeteners to compensate for the lack of sugar. Margarine, aspartame, glutamate etc are all seen as unnatural products.

The idea is that by eating this way, you will lower the amount of insulin (the hormone that regulates your blood sugar, but also the way you store fat in your body) in the blood, thus causing less fat to be stored in the body.

I’ve started a separate blog about me and LCHF which can be found at http://lchffood.wordpress.com, there is also a link to it in the list.

http://lchffood.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/lchf/

In short, the polyunsaturated fatty acids that has been said to be so great for our bodies have been proved to be less good, the unsaturated fatty acids are still the “good” ones and the saturated ones are now deemed as neutral. They are also making studies on whether the cholesterol is such a bad thing. If your body is healthy and fine it’s supposed to regulate the absorption of cholesterol and in that case eating food high in cholesterol is not a problem as your body will only use what it needs. Cholesterol has also been shown not to be the big villain in cardiovascular diseases. Stress, smoking, obesity and lack of exercise are all considered much worse. Of course it could be discussed whether the high amount of fat and cholesterol leads to obesity. But some claim it doesn’t, that people eat much more processed carbohydrates today which leads easier to obesity than the actual fat does. That is however a discussion for another post.

All in all, this actually supports my own personal idea, that if your body is healthy and in balance you can eat a lot of things, but your body will only absorb what it actually needs.

Disclaimer: This has been my observation while traveling, I’m not saying this is a stated fact, I’m broadly generalizing. Feel free to disagree.

People (read: media, doctors, nutritionists, people in general etc) always talk about the bad eating habits of Americans. There are also worries throughout the west world about increased obesity, more cases of cardiovascular disease and other food-related diseases.

Food habits

In general, I’d say the average Swede cooks more food at home, whether pre-prepared to some point or completely from scratch. The average American won’t cook much. The average Swede will eat breakfast at home or at work, lunch at a lunch restaurant/at work and dinner at home.

The Americans I’ve known have eaten most, if not all, meals in a restaurant or as take-away. At times breakfast has been eaten at home, while lunch has been eaten however it’s been most common at the workplace and dinner has been either take-away or eaten at the restaurant.

Take-away food like pizza, sushi, falafel etc is pretty common in Sweden and TV-dinners are more and more common along with frozen pizza. They work well for the stressed mother or father who is on their way home from work and needs to feed their family. It works for the single person who doesn’t feel like cooking for just one person.

In general the habits are quite alike, I’d say Sweden is heading where the U.S is, we are now getting Mc Donalds that serve breakfast, more and more places serving brunch. The Swedes do however not have a breakfast culture like the Americans, in Sweden it’s still breakfast at home (or on the train while commuting or at an early breakfast break at work, but not in a special restaurant) that is the way to go. We don’t have IHOP’s, Grinder’s, Denny’s, Wendy’s etc. If you want scrambled eggs with bacon, pancakes and syrup you have to make it yourself. For lunch and dinner the Swedes tend to be more acquainted with eating out, specially when it comes to business lunches.

Food markets

They’re of course bigger and more diverse in the U.S, in general they have a better assortment, no matter what you want, it’s usually easier to get it in an American supermarket. You often find a wider variety of goods to eat there or bring home. I’m a Whole Foods kinda gal and I love how I in one single place can buy products to cook my own meal, by pre-made frozen or cold food, buy hot food to bring straight home or just eat in the store.

Some of it is available in Swedish food stores, but a sit in part where you can actually eat the food you just bought doesn’t exist in any food store I know of here.

Restaurants

In general I don’t consider Mc Donalds to be a restaurant. The place doesn’t have to have white linen table cloths, but a certain amount of standard is expected. I’d say in general I don’t consider chain eateries to be restaurants (it varies of course) and here is a big difference, in Sweden we don’t usually have chains – beyond the American fast food chains that are spreading (mainly Mc Donalds, Burger King and Subway) and our own chains of the same variety. But other types of chains like Chili’s, Applebee’s, D’Arby’s etc that are supposed to be a bit more, fancy? They just don’t really exist here. There are a few restaurants that are available in a few different cities in the same region, but to call it a chain would be too much.

Health Aspects

Overall I’d say the Swedes are healthier, that isn’t to say that we don’t have bad habits. Obesity and cardiovascular diseases are an increasing problem here as well as the rest of the west world. But overall we have a health care system that promotes well being, dieticians and doctors are available to help taking care of such problems in a clinical way, at low or no fees. I also believe that cooking most (if not all) of your food promotes health as it means you’re very aware of what is actually in the meal you’re eating, if you just eat out, you tend to have less knowledge of what is actually in there.

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential (paraphrased).

I agree so much with this that I had to start this next chapter on my food crusade with it. I really can’t believe how people can’t taste the difference between margarine and butter, because it’s vastly different.

I will state this to begin with, I’m very much opposed to margarine, it’s pretty much the devil when it comes to cooking and I think it destroys more than it helps, but I am going to discuss the positive and the negative sides with both butter and margarine (and I’ll probably throw in something about oil too, as it’s closely related to the subject).

I know not all of you who read this have studied organic chemistry or nutrition, so I will explain a little bit to you first about fatty acids so all my words further on will make sense (I hope!).

There are three kinds of fatty acids, saturated, unsaturated and polyunsaturated.

Saturated fatty acids are very stable and is the fatty acid that takes the longest time to get rancid, both in- and outside the body. They’re most commonly found in meats and butter fat.

Unsaturated fatty acids are the most common ones in vegetable oils, they’re not as stable as the saturated fatty acids and should preferably be kept in a cool, dark environment, they exist in all fats to some amount, but vegetable oils are made up of mostly unsaturated fatty acids.

Last there is the polyunsaturated fatty acid, the most fickle and delicate of the fatty acids, it will go rancid easily if not kept in cool, dark places. It’s also the one that can form a trans conformation, due to having two “open spaces” on its molecular structure it’s very easily prone to tack on hydrogen atoms that aren’t supposed to be there, thus changing the structure (this is what is used when you make margarine). All vegetable oils contains a small amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids, fat fish is also a very good source.

Margarine

What is margarine essentially? To make margarine you take vegetable oils and vegetable fat with a high amount of unsaturated fatty acids, process them so they harden to a desired point, mix them with cream and/or skim milk (or yogurt in some cases), an emulsifier *, water, salt, coloring, A and D vitamins and preservatives. The exact ingredients will vary depending on country, brand etc, but they are pretty much the same.

Butter

Butter contains cream, salt and sometimes lactobacillus. The U.S uses pasteurized cream while Europe uses unpasteurized cream, thus leaving a slightly different quality to the butter. The European version is more yellow and distinct in taste while the U.S butter is whiter in color and lighter in taste. In my opinion the European butter also gets a creamier, richer texture.

Pro Margarine

Margarine is made with mostly vegetable fat, making this a good source for unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids. It’s easy to design for different purposes. You want a fat that can stand higher temperatures, that will have a high browning point and low smoke point? Voilà, it’s easy to create. Want a fat that’s specifically made for puff pastry? It exists! This is one reason today that so many industries have a hard time going away from certain kinds of fats (that may contain trans fatty acids), since it was designer made for their kind of product basically. It can be lower in fat and it’s also cheaper than butter.

The not so pretty side of margarine

It’s made chemically, it may not contain plastic like some critics claimed and today most margarines actually won’t contain trans fats either, but it was still industrially designed, you need to bring it through the process of hardening relatively good vegetable oils, thus lowering the quality. You add preservatives, emulsifiers and coloring to make it a  usable product. It’s got an artificial taste, an oily texture to it, it won’t heighten the flavors of your other food and it brings a dull sort of feeling to the food it’s used in. Due to containing preservatives it’s less likely to go rancid, but the added water makes it more prone to mold.

Pro Butter

It’s a very simple product made out of cream and salt basically, you can make it at home in your own kitchen, it’s been around as long as people have used dairy. It’s a natural flavor enhancer that can turn the most dull food into something quite marvellous. You need quite small amounts of it to get the flavor benefit.

The dark side of butter

It contains mostly saturated fatty acids and is very low on polyunsaturated fatty acids, it’s got a lower smoking and burning point than margarine and oil, making it a bit less suitable for frying in high temperatures. It’s high in fat content (80%).

Controversy

Saturated fatty acids have a long time been seen as the devil when it comes to modern nutrition, it’s considered one of the main factors for cardiovascular diseases and is known to “clog” up the vessels. But a recent study (and I really do wish I had a link for it here, but it was mentioned in class by my lecturer and I forgot to ask her about which study it was) has shown that there are certain benefits to eating saturated fats, it is more stable in its form, even in the body, it’s less prone to go rancid which means the body can benefit from it longer. This does, however, not mean that we should increase our doses massively, just that we can use it with a little less caution since it’s actually doing less damage in the body than what was commonly believed. The recommended amounts of a daily intake does stay the same so far.

My own view on the matter

I’ve tried to (I said tried, never said I managed 100%) stay as unbiased as I could, but this is the part where I get to say what I think. I think the ultimate fat is a combination between butter and oil, these are the only kinds of fat I use in my cooking. I use different fats for different purposes. I have four kinds, I use butter, olive oil, canola oil and clarified butter (ghee).

Butter and olive oil (extra virgin) are for flavoring purposes only and are used in quite small amounts (and never heated really). Canola oil and clarified butter are for frying mostly. Canola oil is low on polyunsaturated fats which means it can take heat pretty good, clarified butter is butter that’s been cooked so the water, proteins, lactose and salt went away, it’s 100% fat, but butter fat. It’s suitable for all kinds of cooking (except deep-frying) and baking.

Taste and texture wise, I prefer butter to margarine, I also like to know what’s in the stuff I eat, and I feel that I have that controlled with butter, much less so with margarine. Health wise it still needs to be discussed whether margarine is actually better for you, from a fat point of view, yes, but looked at from a quality vs quantity point of view I wouldn’t agree that margarine is better for you, butter contains less additives and is effective in smaller amounts.

Conclusion

Margarine is probably better for you fat wise, but if you stick to smaller amounts of butter (to get that nice flavor), you’re fine. Quality wise, I’d argue that the fat used in margarine is of lower quality than the cream used in butter. I am also suspicious of the process of hardening the vegetable fat for margarines, even though they now claim that the process won’t risk turning the polyunsaturated fatty acids into trans fatty acids.

In the end however, you shouldn’t eat massive amounts of fat as it is, chosing good quality fats in low amounts is what I advocate, and if I’m only going to eat a little, at least I want it to be good.

* Margarine is what we call an emulsion, it’s a mix between two things that wouldn’t normally blend and stay that way, to make them mix you add an emulsifier that will keep them together. Egg yolks contain lecithin and is commonly used in restaurants as an emulsifier, while soy lecithin is the most common emulsifier in the industry (look at your package of chocolate next time for example, unless it’s VERY good quality of dark chocolate, like Michel Cluizel etc, there will be soy lecithin). If you want to mix water and oil, it might mix if you shake it well, but the moment you stop it will separate, due to the water and the lipid (fat) receptors repulsion for each other, adding an emulgator will stabilize it and keep them together (make a vinaigrette and add mustard – which has an emulsifying agent in its shell – it will stick together). Examples of emulsions are; chocolate, mayonnaise, Hollandaise and milk.

Our lecturer brought in nose clamps and small tubes of a powder, she handed us one each, told us to put on the nose clamps and pour the powder into our mouths. As we did all we felt was a very sweet flavor, that was it, absolutely nothing else. Then she told us to remove the clamps and as we did our mouths were filled with a strong cinnamon flavor (the tube contained cinnamon powder and sugar).

Now, you would think that with such a strong flavor, it would shine through, but it really didn’t, we had absolutely no idea what was in our mouths until we removed the clamps.

So how was it that we could taste the sweetness of the sugar but not the cinnamon?

To start off we have our taste buds that are situated on the tongue. They register the five basic tastes that are sweet, salt, sour, bitter and savory/umami*. These can all be registered even if your nose is clogged up**, they also have in common that they are water soluble, this is the reason you can taste them the moment they hit your tongue.

The rest are however fat soluble which means that you will need to smell them in order to taste them. If you combine the basic taste of a food and the smell of it, which is registered by the olfactory epithelium, you get a flavor. In order to completely register this flavor you need to be able to both smell and taste your food.

An unknowing test person was served a delicious chocolate mousse, while he was eating someone passed him with a piece of cloth smelling of garlic, the test person swore that there was garlic in the mousse.

*Umami is a relatively new taste that was added to the basic tastes,  you get it mostly from the chemical MSG (monosodium glutamate), a kind of salt that is added as a flavor enhancer, it used to be more common in asian food, today it’s used throughout the western world too though, mostly in pre-made food, MSG exists naturally in mushrooms.

** Here it could be discussed where the spicyness, the heat, that you get from spices such as chili and peppers should be placed as the heat is noticeable even if you can’t smell it. I will say that I don’t know, but I intend to find out.

I am writing about flavors, taste buds and the difference between water soluble and fat soluble flavors, it’s one of many things that has been discussed in Sensory classes and there will be an update on it as soon as I’m done with it.

I’ve studied food science since -04 and have been working as a chef before that, I went to culinary school as well to become a trained chef, but decided, when I was done, that I’d prefer working as something else (after having worked for 8 years as a chef) within the food business. The plan right now is to work with Swedish food culture and to help spread it, preferrably in the U.S.