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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Butter or Margarine? Hmmmmm...

This is interesting ...

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into this wonderful stuff wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal, so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings.

DO YOU KNOW.. the REAL difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end...this is just starting to get interesting!

Both have the same amount of calories.

Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams.

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.

Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few, and only
because they are added!

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods.

Butter has been around for centuries while margarine has been around for less
than 100 years.


And now, for Margarine…

Very high in trans fatty acids.

Triple risk of coronary heart disease.

Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers
HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)
Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold.
Lowers quality of breast milk.
Decreases immune response.
Decreases insulin response.

And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT
IS VERY INTERESTING!

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC!!!

This fact alone was enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is used to change the molecular structure)

You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or
shaded area. (open) Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things:

Ø no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something)
Ø it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value.
Ø nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic.

Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

Regular readers,
If you have been keeping up with me for the last few years you already know a lot of this. I don’t use butter OR margarine. I use something better than either of those. If you want to know what, send me an e-mail.

I posted this almost the way I received it. I had to do a little editing and cleanup, but the text is mostly the way it came to me. This might be the seventh or even the twenty-seventh time I’ve received this, but I don’t believe I’ve ever posted it anywhere.

Monday, February 11, 2008

The Winter Doldrums

To those of you who regularly read my ramblings here, I apologize for my recent absence. Though I am humbled to think that anyone would purposely read anything I write, I do appreciate your kind indulgence and try to provide some sort of verbiage here on a fairly constant, if irregular, basis. But the unavoidable fact is that no matter how sleek the sail boat, without some wind to fill the sails it's just a place to sit. I hit a patch of nothingness recently, no wind, or some might say, no hot air to fill my sails. I have just been sitting, taking a small break.
If life is a grand experiment, then mine is still in progress, though at times the progress is too small to measure by any conventional means.

Since all that I write and publish in this space is free, then perhaps I cannot be fired. I hope to soon be fired up though, enough at least to write something. Ideas are percolating, vague thoughts are forming, fingers are itching to get at the keyboard. But for about three weeks I've been just coasting, both in terms of writing and music. If this was a paying gig, I would be near starvation at this point, but fortunately I do still having a J O B. And I haven't been completely idle. My wife, who is enjoying a hopefully brief hiatus from gainful employment, has kept me fairly busy at home sorting and sifting through piles of "stuff", mostly mine, and we have begun to recapture our office/exercise room. Soon we will start on the music room where the wallpaper has already begun to remove itself, either out of boredom with my music or a realization that it is no longer wanted. Then there is the foyer, the dining room, the guest bath, the master bath, and ...well the list is endless. Like the crews that paint the Golden Gate Bridge, once we get to the end of the list, if ever we do, it will be time to start over. Somewhere along the way, I will try to write a few lines here, and I hope you will find time to read them, and more importantly, to comment on them and contribute your own thoughts. This has been a too-solitary work so far. I have hoped that it would become more of a forum.