Margarine & Butter

I've spent quite a bit of time searching for the best replacement for margarine and butter (yes the excitement is never ending) and it's been a fairly interesting exercise. Due to my drastic cutting out of bread I have only been having two slices of a 400g loaf of bread for toast a day for breakfast, but the obsession with finding the best solution to non-dry toast became quite a pass time for me during my label reading in the supermarkets.

For reference 10g of butter or margarine is enough to lightly cover a single slice of bread. I will run through some of the products I've discovered over the past six months:

• Flora Buttery Light per 10g - 40 calories, 4.5g of fat.

• Flora Light per 10g - 28 calories, 3g of fat.

• Flora Lighter Than Light per 10g - 19 calories (on the tub it's listed as 20 calories), 4.5g of fat.

• Bertolli Light per 10g - 35 calories, 4g of fat.

• Clover Light per 10g - 45.4 calories, 4.9g of fat.

• Clover Lighter than Light per 10g - 35.5 calories, 3.8g of fat.

• I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Light per 10g - 35 calories, 3.8g of fat.

• Lurpak Lightest Spreadable per 10g - 38 calories, 4g of fat.

So as you can see there are plenty of options open to you that are lower in calories than your average margarine or butter spread:

• Flora per 10g - 41 calories / 4.5g of fat.

• Clover per 10g - 64 calories / 7g of fat.

However after a recent discovery I've now stopped having margarine altogether and now use one 35g tub of Philadelphia Lightest** per two small slices toast as this works out at 34 calories per mini tub with 1g of fat which is less than two 10g servings of Flora Lighter Than Light and it doesn't contain any "bad" fats as the Flora product does.

Another top tip is to not have any butter or margarine spreads on your toast if you are having baked beans with it, once the beans are all over the toast you won't notice the missing spread, the same can be said of eggs as well. The same goes for sandwiches and rolls: if you're having a condiment in it, like for example light mayonnaise, will you actually notice there's not any butter or margarine spread in it? Not really.

**For some reason the Philadelphia official website nutritional information for Lightest Minitubs is blatantly wrong: if you change the drop down from "per 100g" to "per 35g" the site says it contains 38 calories per mini tub when you can clearly see in the photographic illustration that it's 34 calories per mini tub, so I've used a Tesco link for the product instead.