Ramy Burjony's Blog

Pass the butter Wednesday, January 27, 2010 Have a read of the following:

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money in to the research 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 yellow colouring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavours.

Do you know the difference between margarine and butter? Read on to the end... gets very interesting! Both have the same amount of calories. Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8g; compared to 5g for margarine. 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 whereas margarine has a few and only because they are added!

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavours of other foods. Butter has been around for centuries, but margarine has been around for less than 100 years. Margarine; very high in trans fatty acids, triples the 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 times, lowers the quality of breast milk, decreases immune response, decreases insulin response, and, here's the most disturbing fact, margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC and shares 27 ingredients with paint.

These facts alone were enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance).

You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it open in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will notice a couple of things - no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies, will go near it (that should tell you something). It does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny micro organisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

To get to my point, over the past ten years community pharmacy has been getting the short end of the stick. Now they are taking codeine containing products and rescheduling them as Pharmacist Only medicines with a five day supply pack. I do share the concerns codeine could be an addictive substance but come on this is becoming a joke.

Why is it a product such as margarine that clearly is a huge causative factor for heart disease, etc, can go on the market without a shred of regulation, not to mention the most obvious of the addictive substances, nicotine. So let’s see, within the last year or so, pharmacy has faced, lost, or is about to lose pseudoephedrine products, restrictions on codeine containing products, prohibition of sales of cough and cold products to parents with children under the age of two - and this maybe increased to the age of 6, and the list goes on and on.

Try telling a patient “I have to record your name because you are buying Panadeine”, or “sorry I cannot sell you anything for your child’s cold because he is five-years-old” believe me that ain’t gonna go down well. And who cops it at the end? That’s right the pharmacist gets their name plastered all over the paper because the patient had to be interrogated for wanting to buy Nurofen or Panadeine.

GET REAL. Something has got to be done about this otherwise no one is going to want to walk into a pharmacy. A pharmacist was the first health professional a patient would visit, emphasis on the “was”.  

Disgruntled

Ramy Burjony

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