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.
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.