I Can't Believe It's Not Butter
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I Can't Believe It's Not Butter® is a brand of margarine low in sodium and trans fat. It is a popular condiment for people on the South Beach Diet, though it predates the diet by decades. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is a sub-brand of Becel/Flora which is part of Unilever [1] [2].
The name comes from the marketing claims that the product has the same taste qualities as real butter, but with the apparent "easy to spread" properties of margarine.
Model Fabio Lanzoni appeared in a number of popular ads for the product. Playing off of his reputation as a romance novel cover model, the commercials topically revolved around a woman who was seeking a healthy but tasty alternative to butter. Fabio would then appear and in some spoof on a typical romance novel plot would "rescue" the woman from untasty butter substitutes and carry her off into the sunset. The theme was revitalized in a series of 2005 commercials, this time using a variety of other male models. On
June 7, 2006, Greg Vaughan was officially named the new product spokesman.
Several years after the original product was introduced a spray version was released called I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Spray.
In Australia, in January 2005, the "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" spread was renamed "Flora Buttery Taste", but remains an identical product. Per 100g of spread, it has 70g of fat, with around 8.4% saturated, 57% monounsaturated, 24.5% polyunsaturated, and 0% trans fats.
[edit] Trivia
- References often appear in The Simpsons. In The Itchy and Scratchy Show, Itchy made Scratchy into butter called I can't believe it's not Scratchy; the episode title was "Butter Off Dead". Lionel Hutz works for "I Can't Believe it's a Law Firm". When asked if he had any skills that would be useful in teaching an adult education class, Homer claimed to be able to tell the difference between I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, and butter - but then admitted that no one could. There is an infomercial series starring Dr. Nick Riviera, "I Can't Believe They Invented It".
- It was also used in the "8 Simple Rules for Buying My Teenage Daughter" episode of Family Guy, where Peter Griffin used it as a running joke.
- Advertisements featuring the product often end with the question, "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, can you?"
- The company recently expanded the soap opera spoofs with an online soap opera series entitled "Sprays of Her Life"—a cartoon that takes place in the refrigerator, with the main parts played by a bottle of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Spray.
- In The Vicar of Dibley, Alice Tinker famously references I can't believe it's not butter:
- You know that stuff they're selling now at the local shop, 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter'. Well, you know, I can't believe it's not butter. Then yesterday ... I bought this other stuff, like a sort of home-brand you know... Well I can't believe the stuff that is not 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' is not 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter', and I can't believe that both 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' and the stuff I can't believe is not 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' are both, in fact, not butter. And I believe they both might be butter, in a cunning disguise. And in fact there's a lot more butter around than we all thought there was.
- A famous skit from the British The Sketch Show features a tourist at an airport customs desk, attempting to explain the presence of a large bag of heroin in his suitcase by claiming "It's 'I can't believe it's not Heroin'"
- Appears on Uncyclopedia as several articles named I Can't Believe It's Not X.
- In the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, Stephen Colbert expressed that he refused to believe it's not butter.
- A 2006 advertising campaign in the UK features Ozzy Osbourne and impressionist Jon Culshaw.
- In Seinfeld episode 8.18, Jerry suggests “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Murder” as a replacement for the term Manslaughter when George says that although “manslaughter” sounds brutal it is “the most socially acceptable form of murder.”
- Although the manufacturer claims that the product contains no Trans Fat, this may not be entirely true. Checking the ingredients listed on the package shows hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils as part of the makeup. This is because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows food manufacturers to make the claim as long as each serving of the product has less than half a gram of trans fat. Therefore in a serving of 14g this equates to 3.5% trans fat by weight. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest in April 2006 showed that this and several other spreads claiming "no trans fat" do in fact contain trans fats in what may be considered significant quantities.
