Olivet Nazarene University

 

As more and more natural foods are advertised and become trends, it can be confusing as to what is actually healthy.

Can you describe the chemical difference between natural foods and synthetic foods?

Butter is a saturated triglyceride. Butter is actually a complex mixture of different saturated triglycerides. A typical triglyceride does not have three identical fatty acid chains in the structure, but rather each chain is a different fatty acid.

This is why butter does not melt suddenly, but gradually softens as it is heated. The temperature at which a particular triglyceride melts depends on the length of the fatty acids in the chains. The longer the chain, the higher is the melting temperature.

The gradual softening of butter as it is heated is caused by the melting of the different triglycerides in the mixture known as butter at different temperatures.

Something else affects the melting point of a fat - the shape of the molecule. The more irregular the shape, the higher is the melting point. The regular saturated triglycerides pack together readily to form a solid that melts at a higher temperature. The kinky unsaturated triglycerides will not conveniently pack together into a solid and therefore tend to melt at a lower temperature.

So how and what is margarine made out of? And is it truly better for our bodies than butter?

To make margarine, we take vegetable oils which are unsaturated triglycerides which are usually oily liquids and modify them. We seek to make a spreadable vegetable fat from the oil.

We do this by hydrogenation. Chemists can do this by heating the oil to a high temperature in an atmosphere of hydrogen using a metal catalyst. Unfortunately, the result of hydrogenation is a very hard saturated fat, not at all like butter.

The problem with consuming trans fatty acids is that trans fatty acids increase LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) and lower HDL cholesterol (the good cholesterol) therefore increasing the risk of heart disease. Some studies also have suggested that a diet high in trans fatty acids may be linked to a greater risk of Type 2 Diabetes.

There is another thing about margarine. In the process of hydrogenation a metal catalyst is used to facilitate the chemical reaction without itself being used up. The metal catalyst is a combination of platinum and aluminum, and margarine is contaminated, particularly with aluminum. Aluminum is one of the possible causative agents for Alzheimer’s disease.

Margarine and other hydrogenated fats contain trans fatty acids and aluminum. Both are substances which may be significantly harmful to our bodies. Under these circumstances, the prudent person would not use margarine or other hydrogenated fats whenever these could be avoided. Butter would be the best choice under these circumstances.

There seem to be new synthetic sugars popping up in the market lately. Which is truly healthier to consume, sugar in its natural form, or man-made ones like Splenda?

The difference between sugar and some of its substitutes can be minimal as in the case of Splenda. Splenda is manufactured by selective replacement of three of sucrose’s hydroxyl groups with chlorine atoms. This is a minimal alteration in structure that results in a product that is 320 - 1,000 times as sweet as sucrose, making it roughly twice as sweet as saccharin and four times as sweet as aspartame.

On the other hand, the difference between sucrose and other substitutes can be rather dramatic as in the case of aspartame in which aspartame is a dipeptide, consisting of two amino acids connected together with an amide linkage with one of the amino acids containing a methyl ester. These are very different structures.

In the case of the sucrose substitutes the body responds to much smaller quantities of the compounds as the receptors must be more responsive to the substitutes than to the sucrose, thereby affecting a person’s blood sugar much less.