Where is flora margarine made

Healthy Living. In The Kitchen. What are butter, margarine, and spreads made from? How do I decide whether to buy spread, butter or margarine for my family?

What are trans fats and does Flora contain them? What are the other benefits of butter alternatives such as Flora? Articles for you. These ways make it possible to create high quality margarines that are rich in healthy essential and good fats. Margarine contains good fats as it is made from a carefully selected blend of healthy vegetable oils. Depending on local taste preferences, this blend of vegetable oils and fats is mixed with water, milk proteins, citric acid like in lemon juice and salt.

Lecithin also present in egg yolk is added, to allow the oil and water to mix. In the final step, the oil and water mix is cooled down, while stirring continuously to make it smooth and soft — exactly like you do when you prepare home-made ice cream. It only has to be packed and delivered to your local store, before you place in your shopping cart!

Besides quality, we also care about the environment. Vegetable oils and fats are the basis of our products. We therefore need to ensure the sustainable, healthy growth of our crops. Together with our partners we feel responsible for protecting our environment, not only for now, but for the future too.

Fully hydrogenated fat is incredibly hard, like plastic beads, but the process can be stopped part-way when manufacturers want oils that are still soft but more stable, and it is this partial hydrogenation that creates trans fats see panel. Hydrogenation opened the way for a transformation in European fat consumption. The oils used varied depending on economic conditions. Vegetable oils from the colonies in Africa took their turn with the cotton seed oil that was a byproduct of the US cotton industry and even with whale oil.

The fight against heart disease gave a big boost to the margarine industry and the s saw a rush of new products. Flora was launched in and advertised on TV in By Unilever had begun promoting its use direct to the medical profession, and through the 70s and 80s Flora built a following as the brand that was high in polyunsaturates and better for you.

They point to the French paradox — that the French eat large quantities of butter, cream and meat but do not suffer high rates of heart disease. They also point out that many of the studies that have switched people to low-fat diets have not produced the expected decline in rates of disease. But the great blow to the fat industry, built on claims around heart health, came in the s. Early in the decade, scientific evidence emerged suggesting that the trans fats produced by hydrogenation affected foetal and infant growth.

Then in Professor Walter Willett, the principal investigator in the Harvard nurses study — on which much of the current advice for heart disease and cancer is based — published evidence that nurses in the study who ate significant amounts of trans fats were twice as likely to have a heart attack as those who consumed few trans fats.

In he called hydrogenation "the biggest food processing disaster in US history". In he told an interviewer that the advice to switch from butter to vegetable oils hydrogenated into margarine had turned out to be "a disastrous mistake".

When hydrogenated, the polywassernames were seriously bad news. The official advice had in fact made things worse. In Britain in , an entrepreneur took out adverts for a "Whole Earth Superspread" made without hydrogenated fat, presenting consumers with "the facts that could save your life". Hydrogenation of fats had never been allowed in certified organic foods. His advert said that trans fats from hydrogenation were the biggest single dietary hazard of our time.

Unilever, as manufacturer of Flora, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. Sams lost and was told not to use his adverts again, not on the grounds that his information was inaccurate, for he had mounted a vigorous defence, pointing to the science, but on the grounds that the advert appealed to fear to sell its products.

But for an uncomfortable period, Unilever found itself selling a product marketed as being good for your heart when it was heavy on trans fats now known to be bad for your heart. I put the figures and the account Sams had given me to Unilever in and asked why it had continued to market margarine with trans fats as healthy, when the evidence had come out against them. Its director of external affairs Anne Heughan told me that Unilever's work with polyunsaturated fats had begun when doctors approached it in to come up with a product that would help in a practical way to achieve what scientists and public health policy makers wanted: for the population to cut its intake of saturated fat.

It had thought, like everybody else, that it was doing the right thing. When Walter Willett's evidence in indicated that trans fatty acids were as bad as saturated fats we felt that the weight of evidence had moved and we set about removing them. It took about two years. Unilever changed its other brands slightly later.

The company told me that before reformulation, its spreads contained an average of By trans fats had been reduced to less than 0. Although Flora was not made with hydrogenated fat after , a large number of other fat spreads were until very recently.

When a researcher and I conducted a survey in of what was on sale in UK supermarkets and asked manufacturers what type of oil they used and how it was processed, Unilever was clearly ahead of the rest in removing hydrogenated fats.