Canola Oil vs Butter

Many of us, in our attempts to reach our 'goal weight' adopt different kinds of diets and exercise regimes, stay on them for a while, and then shamelessly give them up out of sheer lack of determination. We tend to ignore the little things that we can do to make our diet healthier, and go for major steps that threaten to bring us close to a breakdown, which finally result in us going back to our daily routine and our constant self doubt. One such simple thing that can be done, to make your diet a little less concentrated in saturated fats is to use canola oil instead of butter in the food that you prepare. This Buzzle article will tell you about the benefits of canola oil over butter and how you can use it in different food items.

Canola Oil or Butter: Which is Better?

There has always been a long search for something that will help us curtail the amount of fat and cholesterol that we intake. How can we reduce it? What are the substitutes to the sources of these fats and trans fats? Well, here's the answer. Firstly, we need to identify what is the source of the excess fat in our body. No prizes for guessing! Yes, our delicious fried foods and dairy products are the ones that contribute heavily to the increase in the amount of fat and cholesterol in our body. So, we need a substitute that does not alter the taste of the food too much, does not take away the nutritional value of the food and also has a significantly low amount of fats and trans fats in it. Enter, canola oil. In the sections below, we'll see the benefits of canola oil over butter in cooking. It will help you understand why to use it instead of that slab of butter that you're so fond of.

Butter
Butter is probably the most concentrated form of fats that you'll get. It is a 100% dairy product, which has some water and almost 80% of saturated fat from milk. In addition to this, it also has some other milk solids in it. It uses milk and/or cream in its preparation. That in itself gives it an alarming fat and cholesterol content. Around 100 calories in a single spoon, along with around 5-7 grams of saturated fat and 30-33 grams of cholesterol is definitely something to be concerned about. In addition to the fat and cholesterol content, since butter is purely a dairy product, it has another drawback. There are a lot of people who are allergic to dairy and dairy products of any kind. So, using something to substitute butter is definitely a good idea for such people. It is also an excellent idea to take care of your weight and your heart.

Canola Oil
Now that you've seen the damage that constant use of butter in cooking can do, let us now see what is the substitute that you can use to make sure that your meals are healthier, lighter and taste just the same. Canola oil has been used as a healthy substitute for butter since quite some time now. It is a much lighter ingredient, compared to butter and quite similar to olive oil, which can be used as a canola oil substitute. The saturated fat content in a spoon of canola oil is somewhere between 2-4 grams (compared to 5-7 of butter) and it has a 0 cholesterol level, which makes it one of the friendliest oils for your heart.

There are many who argue that even though butter is a dairy product, it is better than canola oil because canola oil, after being extracted from the rapeseed, is required to undergo a lot of processing in order to be used for cooking. Butter, on the other hand, is a completely natural product and so it does not have many dangers.

So, it's really a matter of personal choice, whether you want to think of the benefits of the final product or you want to look into how it is manufactured and judge by that whether it is good for you or not. There will be no end to the argument about which if the two is better, because people lobby for both the products very staunchly. The best way to decide is to try both of them and see which one works better for your health and your heart.