Butter Battles Shortening

An old friend recently asked: “Which is better for you—butter or shortening?” She thought shortening would be better because it is, after all, made from vegetable oil, not the animal fat in butter.

This is one of those questions asked year after year. There are two things to think about when talking about the health benefits (or health harm) from cooking fat:

• The type of fat: Saturated fat and trans fats are BAD and monounsaturated fat and omega-3s are BEST. (In the middle are the other polyunsaturated fats—namely, omega-6 fatty acids that we get way too much of in American cuisine and which, in excess, promote inflammation of all kinds in the body.)

• The total amount of fat: Excess fat in food can lead to excess calories, since fat is a calorie-dense ingredient and the more fat you have in a food or recipe, the more of the bad fats you may be getting.

That said, what does this mean for butter and shortening? Well, shortening is basically hydrogenated vegetable oil, so manufacturers do take polyunsaturated fat from vegetable oil, true, but then they turn butter and shortening into saturated fat when they pump them with hydrogen. Butter is also mostly saturated fat. In this case, they are probably equally unfavorable. Butter tastes better to me, so you can get by with less of it, a point in its favor, in my humble opinion. In recipes that REQUIRE butter, I always use whipped butter, because it reduces the amount of total fat and saturated fat, basically by adding air into the equation.



Ideally, for potential recipes, I would switch to canola oil or olive oil if possible. The healthiest types of cooking fats are olive oil and canola oil because olive oil is mostly monounsaturated fat and canola oil is monounsaturated fat with some plant omega-3s thrown in.

You can do this for recipes like carrot cake and even pie crust (it’s tricky), but you can’t just switch to oil from shortening or butter in other recipes (like cookies or pound cake), in which you are beating the cooking fat with sugar to create a whipped, aerated mixture. In this case, I use whipped butter (and less of it than the recipe calls for—the “magical minimum,” I like to say), or a margarine (and less of it) that has a preferable amount of monounsaturated fat and plant omega-3s, less saturated fat, no trans fat, and around eight grams of fat per tablespoon.



When I reduce the amount of fat called for in a recipe, I have to add another ingredient to compensate for the lost moisture. This could be fat-free sour cream or plain yogurt or orange juice or espresso . . . it just depends on the recipe and what works best.



See what I mean about it being a complicated answer!


By Elaine Magee, MPH, RD
The Recipe Doctor Blog