Myth or fact

Margarine is worse than butter

Short answerNot the way you think

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 202610 sources

Not anymore. The margarines people learned to fear were made with partially hydrogenated oil, full of trans fat. US food hasn’t been allowed to add that oil since 2018, and today’s soft tub spreads carry a fraction of butter’s saturated fat.

There’s a good reason people distrust margarine. It’s made from plant oil, so it looked like the heart-healthy choice, and then it turned out to be full of trans fat, which raises LDL and lowers HDL. The lesson a lot of people took was to trust old foods over new ones, and go back to butter.

That lesson was right about the old margarine. The product on the shelf has changed, and butter hasn’t.

How did margarine get such a bad name?

The trick that made solid fat from liquid oil was patented in 1903, and in June 1911 Crisco, a shortening made from hardened cottonseed oil, reached American grocery shelves. Stick margarine was made the same way for most of the century.

The trouble was the trans fat the process made. The researchers who later recovered data from a diet trial run in Minnesota from 1968 to 1973 wrote that the common margarines and shortenings of that period “were rich sources of industrially produced trans fatty acids”. In 1990, Ronald Mensink and Martijn Katan in the Netherlands fed 59 young adults three diets that differed only in their fat. Compared with oleic acid, the main fat in olive oil, trans fat raised LDL and also lowered HDL. Saturated fat raised LDL and left HDL where it was.

For years, margarine really could be worse than butter. Then the US took the main source away. In 2015 the FDA found partially hydrogenated oils were no longer “generally recognized as safe”, and after June 18, 2018, manufacturers couldn’t add them to food for most uses.

What’s in a tub now?

Four current US soft tub spreads in the USDA’s branded foods database, checked in November 2026, ran from 6.7 to 17.9 g of saturated fat per 100 g, with a middle of about 6.9 g. Butter has about 51 g per 100 g.

Spreads vary a lot, even among the four, so the label is the place to look. Check the saturated fat per serving, and make sure “partially hydrogenated” isn’t in the ingredients.

Butter carries trans fat of its own. A tablespoon has about 0.46 g, all natural, from milk fat. The FDA’s ban didn’t touch natural sources, and since a label rounds anything under 0.5 g a serving to zero, a butter label can show 0 g.

What about the health studies?

We don’t know of a long trial of today’s tub spreads against butter. The closest evidence is on butter against plant oils. In a study that followed 221,054 US adults for up to 33 years, people who ate the most butter had 15% more deaths than those who ate the least, and swapping 10 g of butter a day for plant oils went with 17% fewer deaths. That study measured oils, not spreads, and it was observational, so the people who used more oil may have differed in other ways.

Less saturated fat, with unsaturated fat in its place, lowers LDL, and a soft spread made from plant oils is one way to do that on bread. cholesterol.guide works out the size of the swap for your own LDL.