It’s great to see that you’re avoiding hydrogenated oils and are eating healthy sources of fat like coconut oil and butter. Hopefully that butter is from a pasture raised cow!

I like saturated fats that I drink virgin coconut oil (3 tsp a day) and eat butter (<1 tsp).

This informative article has refreshed my mind about trans fats.

I rarely eat peanut butter, but if I ate it more, I’d certainly be more than happy to deal with the naturally occurring “inconvenience” of the oil separating!

Excellent article!

As far as I know, palm oil doesn’t contain any trans fat and the reason why some people consider it to be unhealthy is because of it’s saturated fat content. However, as I mentioned in this article and in the articles I wrote about the cholesterol myths and the Fat Head documentary, saturated fat does not cause heart disease and is an essential part of good health. It’s a critical part of the brain, the nervous system, and cell membranes and is a naturally occurring oil that has been used by primitive cultures for as long as 5,000 years.

Both Mary Enig and Sally Fallon, who are both authors and representatives of the Weston A. Price Foundation, both state that palm oil is a health oil, just like coconut oil.

Some manufacturers are swapping palm oil for trans fats for that very reason. You can see it happening in things like “natural, no-stir” peanut butter.

Any type of fat that’s processed should be a concern! You raise a great point since trans fats are being used less and most people don’t know about interesterified fats. Eating traditional foods is indeed a great way to avoid unnatural fats as well as many of the other altered nutrients and unnatural chemicals that modern science has introduced to our food.

Fortunately, the ingredients of Smart Balance products are available on their website. I looked at the 67% and 37% original spreads and neither of them contain trans fat, but they both contain soybean and canola oil which I think are undesirable based on the reasons mentioned in the article. Soy also has additional issues of its own that can lead to hormonal imbalance and poor digestion among other things.

Does your husband still believe that saturated fat causes heart disease? If so, there’s plenty of information refuting this belief and the Fat Head documentary is an excellent place to start learning about it. Tom Naughton, the creator of this documentary, is also the author of the article about margarine that Arlo linked to below.

Perhaps your husband may also have been persuaded by the flax content. Although flax is a good source of ALA omega-3 fatty acids, it doesn’t contain the more important DHA and EPA forms of omega-3. Although the body can convert ALA into DHA and EPA, some people don’t make this conversion well. Uncontaminated seafood is the best source of DHA and EPA.

As Arlo stated, the bottom line is that butter is natural and butter spreads like Smart Balance aren’t. In cases like this, we are forced to make the choice of trusting nature or science. In my opinion, it is a common sense approach to favor nature, especially with the amount of politics and monetary incentives that is corrupting modern science.

In my opinion, the most effective way to convince your husband is to let him see the health benefits that you experience from making healthy choices.

I hope that helps!