More consumers are taking the time to educate themselves and wise up to the serious health problems associated with consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils. These health villains include soy, corn, canola, safflower and sunflower which quickly become rancid and laced with free radicals when processed. Food manufacturers are slowly but surely starting to respond to this change in consumer preference.
Why has it taken so long you might ask? That’s an easy one. Food manufacturers and their shareholders love polyunsaturated oils. Partially hydrogenated or not, they are incredibly cheap to produce and make the bottom line very attractive to corporate shareholders.
Fortunately, there is a healthy fat that can be used in processed foods in place of those nasty polyunsaturated vegetable oils that meets the profit demands of food company shareholders and also satisfies the ever growing consumer clamor for a healthy, traditional fat.
That fat is palm oil.
Wary consumers such as myself have been delighted to see palm oil becoming a more frequent player on the ingredients list of all sorts of packaged foods in recent years. The different types of palm oil can be confusing, however. Are they all equally healthy, you might wonder?
Many Names for Palm Oil – Are You Confused?
The names I’ve seen used are palm oil, palm fruit oil, and palm kernel oil. There is also red palm oil which is a very strong tasting oil that can be purchased for home cooking in ethnic grocery stores. It is not used in processed foods, at least the ones I’ve examined.
I like to keep explanations simple as overly complicated things will rarely be remembered. This is especially true at that critical moment when you are about to decide in the store whether or not to buy a food based on what you see on the label.
The bottom line is that palm oil is a healthy fat regardless of the name used on the label. Â Palm oil, palm fruit oil, and palm kernel oil are all just fine and dandy.
The difference is the amount of saturated versus monounsaturated fat in the various types of palm oil. This variation is determined by the part of the palm fruit from which the oil is obtained.
Palm oil (Palm Fruit Oil) Benefits
Palm oil is derived from the fleshy part of the palm fruit. Hence, it is sometimes referred to as palm fruit oil.
It is approximately 50% saturated fat and 40% monounsaturated fat (oleic acid – the same type of fat in olive oil). The remaining 9-10% is polyunsaturated fat in the form of linoleic acid. This is a very low amount of these inflammatory type of fat, which is excellent.
Neither saturated nor monounsaturated fats are easily damaged by processing so this fat is a healthy shortening to include in a snack item.
The mild flavor and pale color of palm oil also works well for blending with a variety of foods.
Palm Kernel Oil Benefits
Palm kernel oil is derived from the hard and innermost, nutlike core of the palm fruit. It contains 82% saturated fat, much higher than regular palm oil.
The remainder is about 15% monounsaturated fat and only 2% polyunsaturated fats. Both of these amounts are significantly lower than palm oil.
Palm kernel oil is healthier than regular palm oil for 2 reasons.
Closer to Coconut Oil
First, the higher amount of saturated fat makes palm kernel oil a closer match to coconut oil than palm oil. This is a good thing as I try to limit the amount of monounsaturated fats in my diet as they can contribute to weight gain. In 1994, the journal The Lancet published a study which noted that fat tissue is primarily composed of monounsaturated fat. Could this be a contributing reason for middle age weight gain that is so common in Mediterranean countries (Eat Fat Lose Fat, p.70)?  Being of middle age, this is definitely something that I watch out for!
Rich in Lauric Acid
Secondly, palm kernel oil is a rich source of lauric acid, that magical medium chain saturated fat that is highly antimicrobial. It is specially produced by the mammary gland for a breastfeeding baby to ingest and benefit from.
Coconut oil is also high in lauric acid which is one reason it is such a wonderfat being studied by scientists all over the world for it’s anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal properties. This characteristic is particularly valuable in the face of the worrisome problem of increasing antibiotic resistance.
Hence, if I can get a food that includes palm kernel oil versus a similar one that has palm oil, I will personally choose the palm kernel oil every single time. Note that food manufacturers remove some or all of the lauric acid from MCT oil. It is also called liquid coconut oil, but it does not confer the same benefits.
Is Palm Oil Sustainable?
There is a downside to all forms of palm oil and that is the issue of sustainability. Â Deforestation to make way for palm plantations is certainly an extremely troubling environmental concern as is the loss of habitat for the orangutans in some locations such as Borneo.
As a result, it is important to support companies that use a sustainable source of palm oil so that your food dollars do not contribute to these environmental problems.
Another alternative is to just make as many of your snacks at home as you can using traditional fats that you have sourced yourself from reliable, green manufacturers.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Related Information
Coconut Sugar: Â A Healthy and Sustainable Sweetener
Five Healthy Fats You Must Have in Your Kitchen
Walnut Oil: Healthy Sub for Flax Oil
Dr. Oz Gets it Really Wrong about Pumpkin Seed Oil
Selecting a Healthy Cooking Oil and Reusing it Safely
Caution When Using Chicken Fat for Cooking
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Best to avoid palm “oil” if you want to eat “green” and live longer along with our planet. For health best to avoid as much processed food as possible and aim for a varied moderate intake diet low in both fat sugar and salts.
Bon appetit!
Researchers are catching up to the truth of certain mistakes that are commonly made and the real facts are beginning to come out. As has been thoroughly and eloquently explained on this blog site in the past, fat and salt are not bad for you but the low-fat and low-salt fads our society has been going through are very hard on human health.
I’m with you on unprocessed foods! In our home we eat almost zero factory foods. And our only sweetener is raw local honey. It is amazing what a beneficial effect that type of diet has on your taste buds as well as your health! 🙂
If you’re concerned about sustainable palm oil users and manufacturers, a great place to go is http://www.rspo.org. They have a huge database there where you can find and look up manufacturers.
I just checked out the website that you provided, and was sad to see the following article: Palm oil agreement to accelerate Indonesian traceable and sustainable palm oil productionhttp://www.rspo.org/news_details.php?nid=202
Actually, they are only going to accelerate the decimation of rainforest and, ultimately, lead to more local people planting palm trees. Why is this bad? 1. Villages are already flooding regularly due to rainforest decimation. 2. Palm trees ruin the soil. In 30 years all of the land that has been planted with palm trees will be useless, whereas traditional crops such as rubber trees, cinnamon trees, etc, once they’re not productive anymore can be cut down, and the rainforest will takeover the land again eventually. 3. Palm oil corporations and the government regularly lie, cheat and steal from the local people, what will keep them from lying to those who buy their oil as well? A stamp that says it is sustainable is for your conscience, not theirs. If they had conscience they wouldn’t be investing in palm oil. The political and social situation is too complicated for a Western organization to fully grasp. Although it is humorous that they haven’t noticed that the majority of palm oil is planted in what was previously rainforest. 4. The RSPO is, at it’s roots, just another corporation trying to make money. Even if they DO invest in small stakeholders, they’re not ultimately looking out for the good of the local Indonesian people, they are looking out for THEIR stakeholders.
The fact that the company that signed the MOU is government owned is even more disturbing. That means that the government will probably start paying local people to plant their land with palm oil instead of their traditional crops. Thus, instead of slowing rainforest decimation this MOU has probably actually initiated an increase by leading to government encouragement of palm production.