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 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?