Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!
It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire "butter-like" fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I'm not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!
- traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
- palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
- contains memories of butter
I'm sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.
The misleading advertising aside (seems bad, but it's not what I want to focus on), you claim that palm oil is bad for a person's health.
This article claims with evidence that it is likely no worse than other saturated fats and may in fact be better for overall health than other sources of saturated fat: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4365303/
I am truly interested to know if palm oil is much worse than other saturated fats, so if you have additional source worth reviewing it would be appreciated.
The authors do not note any conflicts of interest either, hopefully they were honest.
Other facts about palm oil which are commonly raised are the sustainability. I did not look into this aspect and further research may be needed.
Palm oil has plant sterols, which interfere with human hormonal signaling and lipoprotein function.
Lots of people think this is a benefit of using plant based fats, but some of us don't
Ahh yes, the pseudo-science group. I'm familiar, it's fun to watch until someone takes them seriously and puts them in power. Then it's scary and hurtful. Please don't hurt people.
phytosterols are a real thing - https://doi.org/10.4331/wjbc.v17.i2.121685
you too!
That article indicates that phytosterols may have a range of benefits. What exactly is your concern?
Thanks for the down vote! Best way to have a civil discussion is to throw negativity around.
The entire point of including the article is to demonstrate that plant sterols are different than animal sterols. In your original comment up thread you were wondering about further differences between palm oil and animal saturated fats like butter.... There you go, they are materially different
The review also lists many potential hazards. If you want to lower your LDL it's a great tool, no question. However, ldl is not a disease and lowering it in isolation isn't going to be good for your health.
Humans ate saturated fat as the primary fat source until about 100 years ago - to blame saturated fat for the modern epidemic of cvd doesn't really make sense.
The real honest answer is it depends. Almost nothing in terms of food is universally better or worse. Calorically, Palm tends to be higher, with some exceptions (due to higher water content in butter). Palm can be made with a ton of different levels of saturation, which is why it's popular in manufacturing (also cost), but how saturated makes a huge difference to how bad it is for you and doesn't need to be labeled. Then there is consideration for natural occurrence of positive vitamins and minerals in some fat sources, or the perceived negative impacts of relatively more processed or less processed fats. Then peoples individual biology's make some choices better than others for them personally.
The most general advice I can give is pay less attention to the source of the fat and more to the nutrition facts call-out for saturated fat (more=bad), from a purely health perspective. From a purely taste perspective, for pies butter and lard are more premium fats and all other sat fats are worse
The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It's like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the environment than electric cars written by an American.
They themselves admit in the opening abstract that "Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil." I'll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.
Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It's the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.
That’s a valid point, but it could be that they’re looking at the global reaction to something they’ve consumed locally for generations with consternation and wanted to investigate it.
That feels like it might have sounded different in your head or I’m not understanding what you mean. There have been many examples of an incredibly unhealthy thing being very mainstream (lead, more than once, but also arsenic, uranium, and mercury, for some of the most egregious examples, but pharmaceutical history is also full of this), so I don’t know why you would want to default to the mainstream on this if that’s what you did mean.
This is also a fair criticism, and I wish there were more research.
When they refer the mainstream information, they are referring to non peer reviewed literature. Based on your last paragraph, it seems that you would also prefer to use peer reviewed studies to make conclusions.
I'm not going to entertain the idea that a person's country of origin precludes them from doing meaningful research on a topic. Instead, we should critique the methods and the sources that they used.
You also brought up soybean oil as a concern. I looked that one up too: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899900721002057
This article shows that replacing saturated fats in a person's diet with soybean oil leads to the same results as if they had used another unsaturated fat. This is the expected result from such a dietary change. Do you have more information about the health concerns of soybean oil that you could share?
Honestly, I don't even trust food science anymore to tell me what is healthy or not. I've completely lost faith that they have any idea of what they're talking about. The industry keeps changing their mind and fucking us around. I'm sure in 10 years they'll be like, oh noo by the way we were completely wrong about saturated fat too.
I have a simple test. Is it highly processed? Unhealthy. My definition of "highly processed" being kind of arbitrary. Looking online, palm oil can be healthy but the stuff used commercially is unrecognisable from the initial product. I'm sure if you got a palm fruit and freshly squeezed it, you'd be eating something healthy. But whatever is in that apple pie I wouldn't trust it. What I was reading
I trust butter because you can make it yourself at home. I don't trust margarine. Just eat normal food.
Do you drink water? What about coffee or tea? All of those are highly processed (or at least they should be to be safe).
Science by its nature is designed to discover new ideas, new knowledge, and new information. When those discoveries happen, the understanding of humanity on a topic changes and improves. It's why we don't dump feces into our drinking water and why our drinking water is highly processed, all thanks to John Snow's (not the character) scientific discovery.
So yes, the recommendations of food science changes because it should. But the basics have been known for a while (protein, carbs, fiber, fats, moderation, etc). The details are still being worked out, but fundamentals are known.
Quite the dishonest argument, especially fuck off with the water is processed too line. The problem with processed foods is not that they go through a manufacturing process, but that the end product contains added sugar, salt, saturated fat, or nitrates in amounts not typically found in fresh homemade foods. The rest is semantics.
Water is not what I'm talking about and you know it lol. Comparing my argument to eating literal shit is just crass. C'mon man, you can do better.
Even the fundamentals keep thrashing all over the place. Red meat good. No wait it's bad. No it's good again but only these kinds. No wait it's the cooking that's bad. Ok now it's the saturated fat. Actually only these kinds of saturated fat. Carbs are good. No they're bad again. Ok some of them are good. No not those ones. Vegetables are good. But not starch. Actually nevermind starch is ok.
Honestly just fuck it. I have no problem with science evolving over time, but specifically food science is very confidently wrong all the time, often completely contradicting itself every few years. They genuinely have no idea what they're doing, it's practically pseudoscience. Honestly you may as well ask A.I. and get a hallucinated list of healthy food, or flip a coin for every food you eat.
Ignore what everyone tells you, listen to your body, and eat what makes you feel good. Not in a dopamine sugar way, but in the genuine way. Like how a homemade hearty stew makes you feel. You already know what's good for you, just tune out the noise and stop overthinking it.
Maybe you didn't mean water specifically, but the water from your faucet is likely more "processed" than a jar of pickles that you make yourself from cucumbers grown by you. Neither of those things are unhealthy and both can be part of a healthy diet. But the pickles are less processed (and loaded with preservatives).
The point is the "amount of processing" is meaningless and impossible to quantify. What processes are involved, the ingredients, and how much of them are present all matter more.
Most of what you're describing are the nuances, which can be confusing. Unfortunately, for food in particular there is a lot of bad information available as well due to traditions, culture, and capitalism. However, there are good sources of information that can simplify nutrition if you want them.
That's why I said it's kind of arbitrary. There's no easy way to quantify it or write down a set of rules that you can follow. Water processing is good, but white bread is bad. Butter is good but margarine and hydrogenated oil is bad. Freezing your own meals is good but store bought frozen meals is bad. Olive oil is good but commercial emulsifiers and refined seed oil are bad. Preserving in salt is good but commercial preservatives are bad. Adding salt to food is good but fast food has too much salt and is bad. Iodising salt is good and adding folate to bread is good.
The line is complicated and blurry and changes for each person even. The only semi-consistent rule I can find, is that as soon as a company is involved and it becomes a "product", it seems to get bad. Their motivation is to make the food addictively delicious, last forever on the shelf, for maximum profit, regardless of how much it fucks you up. Those other kinds of processes (like water treatment) are government funded for the betterment of public health. A company gives zero fucks if you get leaky gut or die of heart failure or get diabetes or obesity or whatever, as long as they're not legally liable.
Not quite, a few quick notes:
white bread is fine, it is no better or worse than other sources of carbs. Whole grain bread is preferred because of the additional fiber and other nutrients, but so long as those are obtained by other parts of the diet it's not a problem.
margerine used to have lots of trans-fats, but thanks to improved regulations it may actually be better than butter for some health conditions. Most margerine is oil and water. It is still fat so should be consumed in moderation. Flavor wise, butter tastes better to most people.
frozen food quality depends on the ingredients, not the freezing or place where it was made. Frozen fruits and vegetables are great. Frozen chicken has lots of protein, just like chicken.
emulsifiers may be good or bad. Eggs and mustard are both emulsifiers. Those may or may not belong in an individuals diets. Emulsifiers by themselves are not universally bad for people.
seed oils are typically lower in saturated fats, cholesterol, and are generally recommended as healthier options compared to saturated or animal derived fats. Seed oils are good.
many common commercial preservatives are salt, acid, and sugar. The amount in the fodds and the amount consumed are the what needs to be considered.
Again you're only picking out the rare good things. I can't help but feel like you're being disingenuous and deliberately trying to misunderstand me or something. When I say frozen food I clearly don't mean spinach pucks. By emulsifiers I don't mean egg whites or EVOO.
That's why I said it's arbitrary, because as soon as you try and write down any actual rules or definitions, it doesn't work anymore, and pizza becomes a vegetable.
The fact of the matter is, obesity and diabetes and colon cancer were practically nonexistent 200 years ago, and now they're epidemics. Our diets are garbage. I'm not claiming I know the exact thing that causes all this trouble, but I think it's fair to say that maybe things like carrageenan and partially hydrogenated fat should be avoided. Anything that is a cheaper substitute that a company uses instead of an organic product should be met with suspicion.
In fact let's do a case study. The ingredients list on a frozen pizza is like an essay. There's this pizza that I used to buy that would consistently make me have horrific diarrhoea and digestive issues. Most of the ingredients are ok. But oh look,
Why is all this crap in a pizza? One of these things makes me severely unwell, but none of them belong in a pizza. You can go on about how good ultra processed foods are, but you'll never convince me that all these additives are good for you, no matter if they are technically approved or not. I believe that you need to be able to understand every ingredient in your food and why it's there. Maybe I just have an unusually sensitive stomach, but even one preservative or E code emulsifier or additive gives me troubles.
Go look at what's actually in white bread. modified tapioca starch (1413), soy flour, acacia gum, vegetable emulsifiers (481, 471, 472e). You can't tell me that's healthy.
You can Google those ingredients, they have specific names which makes them sound scary, but they are all pretty common in normal fruits and vegetables. There's no need to fearmonger.
Sorry that you had GI issues.
BTW, cellulose is just fiber, it is the cell walls of plants.
Also, look up the ingredients of a banana. It has several E numbers.