Comment by estaseuropano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by estaseuropano | Hacker News Reader

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Palm oil is a nightmare in our food chain. It is horrible for the environment and horrible for the body (an aspect totally ignored in this article). And yet it has become near ubiquitous. Living in a big European city I can for instance buy 30+ types of margarine at my regular supermarket. But every single one is full of palm oil. Even supposedly healthy ones based on olive oil (looking at you Bertoli) are to a large degree palm. Even the bio/organic shop has nothing. It's nearly as bad for chocolate, spreads, cakes, veggie or non veggie charcuterie, ... Anything that's not a standardised/pure product is just palm.

2 years ago it was perfectly possible to avoid palm. Today I basically don't see any chance. Even organic and supposedly ethical products are full of palm, just under the pretense of some certification that sums up to 'the forest was killed 10 years ago so we are now able to call ourselves sustainable while the problem is shifted somewhere else'.

Our food systems seem fundamentally broken. Unless I buy basics at the local market and cook everything from scratch I basically have to eat palm, glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine and whatnot other waste every day.

Palm oil is mostly used as a replacement for butter. It is cheaper, no less or more healthier, and probably more environmentally friendly (because butter requires a lot of cows, that produce greenhouse gases, and they also need to be fed on crops, which fields are often created by destroying forests, etc.).

Palm oil is not the devil. We are just using a lot of fat (and sugar) almost everywhere. Even extra virgin olive oil is bad if you use too much: it is liquid fat, and it has more of it compared to butter (because butter has water in it :-D)! Using it for your pastries would not make you healthier.

Just use the right oil/fat in the right quantity.

I totally disagree with your climate change rhetoric here. Even if butter generated a greater effect on climate doesn't mean that swapping rainforest for monoculture plantations is more environmentally friendly!

I miss the "save the rainforest" focus on environmentalism in the 90s. I think it was more emotionally compelling for social action.

> I miss the "save the rainforest" focus on environmentalism in the 90s.

Yes, I agree with you very strongly, and I would love to know more about how many others are out there, especially professionals in the conservation field, that share this concern. The modern obsession with long-term planet-level climate change threatens, unless we qualify it, to be a terrible thing for short-term habitat conservation. And short-term habitat conservation is everything: extinction is for ever. Human suffering is very sad, and we will do our best to alleviate it, but nevertheless we as a species absolutely must not cause extinction of other species on Earth. That is for eternity and transcends human concerns. Wild animal species have extremely specific habitat/vegetation requirements. I think that a generation is growing up that does not understand this: they think that planetary atmospheric concerns are the be-all-and-end-all of conservation concerns, they think that all trees are the same and all birds smaller than a pigeon are the same; they think that reforestation is a solution regardless of species composition of the replacement trees. They seem to be prepared for their great-grandchildren to live in a future where we have averted large-scale economic hardship and suffering but sadly lost the Earth's remaining rainforests during the 21st century. That is not an acceptable future. But currently, the world's governments and super-governmental organizations are, when it comes to environmental issues, entirely focused on climate change. They are not saving the rainforests.

Yay, I'm not the only person who thinks this way.

What's troubling, to me, is that "saving the rainforest" or nature conservancy in general is much more appealing to political conservatives than climate change. In theory, it is much easier to get large companies and nation states to take actions to protect lands than to reduce consumption.

But that's where the philosophy of environmentalism can diverge. Are humans capable of being part of nature? Or are we a cancer on the system? An enormous number of people are very misanthropic these days, on principle.

It's frustrating, also, because consistently-- when people get richer, they care more about preserving nature.

This suggests a natural harmony between economic growth and environtal protection. That idea is very offensive to some; but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of optimism.

I think that you need to explain your idea there a bit more carefully otherwise yes, it does sound questionable. I am an open-minded person and certainly not someone who objects simply because something appears to violate some sort of left-wing dogma.

But, for example, in the southern Amazonian areas of northern Brazil, deforestation is carried out by logging companies and ranch owners, and the ranch and logging company owners mostly come from richer areas of southern Brazil. So local people are poor, and the people from areas with higher GDP are the ones doing the deforesting. At the very least you need to explain why what you said isn't contradicted by obvious examples like that.

The point is you are cutting down the rainforest anyway. Most dairy is produced on factory farms that feed their cattle soy and corn and other monocultures.

Soybeans and corn don't replace rainforest. Palm oil does. No?

Deforestation of the rainforest is also driven by soy cultures and grazing. This is why my comment was not a "I just care about emission" thing as you were assuming.

AFAICT, palm oil was a replacement for trans-fat-containing partially hydrogenated oils, which were causing an unfortunate amount of dying in consumers of the cheap and highly processed foods that contained lots of it.

It could be a replacement, depending on from what you need to prepare. It is usually a good candidate in many recipes where you need a mostly-solid fat. Both palm oil and butter have a high percentage of saturated fatty acids so butter can just be replaced most of the time. Extra virgin olive oil is not a good replacement in those cases for example, even if it is perceived as "more healthy" generally, but it can be the wrong choice if you are frying (and you would lose most of its taste, so it is an expensive waste). That is why I really do not understand "organic / full corn / honey-instead-of-sugar / olive-oil-instead of butter" pastries. It is still a lot of sugar and fat, so you should not probably eat a lot of that. Just eat it a bit less, use the right ingredients and enjoy ;-)

> horrible for the body

That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's quite high in saturated fatty acids, but not anywhere near as much as, say, coconut oil.

> buy 30+ types of margarine

Why buy margarine in the first place? Why not actual butter? Or fats like peanut oil, coconut oil, olive oil, .. ?

> glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine

What's wrong with any of those? What you put in your body is your choice, but this just sounds like FUD to me.

Most of the people are ignorant about the things and fat they put inside their body (that includes me). Please check this video on Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story by the author of the book "The Big Fat Surprise" [1][2].

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14...

Palm oils advantage is it doesn't separate. It replaced partially hydrogenated oils as the way to make peanut butter that doesn't separate for example, but doesn't kill you like partially hydrogenated oils do, as far as I know.

Why buy margarine in the first place?

Margarine seems to be more prominent outside of the U.S. There's usually only a few brands of margarine on American grocery shelves but in Canada there's a whole wall of margarine next to a small shelf of butter. It seems very strange to my American eyes.

Perhaps they are vegan, since the rest of their comment seems to lean in that direction (and it doesn't sound like they enjoy fake foods otherwise).

I disagree about the health aspect. It's very unclear at the moment what the right proportion of saturated/unsaturated/polyunsaturated fats is and the nutrition science on this subject is horrible (partly because the palm oil, soy oil, etc. producers are keenly interested in getting their products billed as healthy). In the US most fast food is made with poly-unsaturated oils (e.g. canola/corn/soy oil) and those foods seem quite unhealthy.

The evidence is pointing very strongly towards saturated fats being bad and towards an imbalance of unsaturated fatty acids towards omega-6 in the common western diet.

These are not novel discoveries, this is mountains of research done over the last couple of decades. Cut down on saturated fats and tilt your balance of unsaturated fat more towards omega-3.

The reason why fast food is unhealthy is not because of the specific oils used (and all of the ones you mentioned are much better than the trans fat nightmares we used to deep fry in). It's unhealthy because it's super heavy in calories, and because they're almost entirely carbs and fats and low-quality protein, and almost completely bereft of vitamins and minerals and fiber. The fat+salt+carbs combo keeps you from being satiated until you're stuffed full.

Focusing solely on the fats used during cooking is myopic. You have to look at the whole picture.

I've looked at the evidence and don't think it is as solid as you do. It also is hard to reconcile the recent trend away from saturated fats with diets that we know are healthier than modern diets, e.g. French cooking that uses lots of butter, a saturated fat. Or Mediterranean cooking that uses lots of olive oil, which is one of the more saturated cooking oils (it also is fairly high in unsaturated fat). I think there is more going on here than the nutrition studies indicate.

I certainly agree about trans-fats. I would never suggest they're healthy. I don't think satiety is the full story about why fast food is unhealthy, nor just the lack of nutrients. It seems to be actively bad. And I'm obviously not focusing on only the fats used during cooking, but I was responding to a comment about palm oil, not about nutrition in general.

Edit: I'm not convinced saturated fats are healthier, either, but I think the science here is very sketchy and generally of low quality.

The diet is only a small part of a given lifestyle, so we can't just boil down the French or mediterranean lifestyles to simply a (stereotypical) diet, rather than looking at all the factors.

It matters how much of that stereotypical food you eat, and the totality of the ingredients.

Plus how sedentary people are, how many snacks they eat outside of meals, hobbies, work, and a whole host of other factors.

The general scientific consensus is pretty clear that saturated fats are unhealthy, trans fats are the worst, and dietary cholesterol seems to not impact serum cholesterol. Science marches on,

I've noticed that I tend to get minor acne-like breakouts on my face from a few things (like pre-packaged chocolate chip cookie dough, as well as several other products) - enough where I looked through the ingredients to try to isolate the cause. Palm oil is my top suspect, but I haven't found anyone else talking about these symptoms with Palm oil. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

Aren't some kinds of palm oil actually good for health?

Palm oil is not unhealthy. Th reason it's bad is because the cheapest way to produce it is to destroy rainforest to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. UK consumers managed through campaigning to force the industry to source 50% of palm oil from non-tropical origins. When the worlwide demand for tropical palm oil drop enough, tropical deforestation will drop.

the health angle comes from the proportions of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated fats presented in the mix, but so does the mechanical angle that makes one mix more useful than another in recipes, i.e. spreads and biscuits; the saturated fats that are responsible for soft spreads and buttery biscuits are also the one that are bad for health.

on the other hand palm oil is just a collection of acids, primarily the saturated palmitic acid, but while the naming stuck because it was firstly isolated there, most oil and fats contains a similar set of the same fatty acids in different proportions; pure butter contains like 15% of naturally occurring palmitic acid, and olive oil contains likewise 5-10% of the stuff.

so well you can take any kind of oil, dilute or reinforce it with saturated / monounsaturated fats, and change it's healthiness in proportion of the rest of the recipe, but in doing so you also change their mechanical properties.

> the saturated fats ... are bad for health.

Citation needed. Isn't this a decades-old myth?

It’s recently in dispute, but calling it a “myth” seems strong as it was the medically agreed upon stance for decades.

I would be interested in hearing the dissent here. To call it a myth would imply that it is intrinsically wrong, but is that proven fact or just newly popular thinking?

The medical establishment still maintains that saturated fats are less healthy than unsaturated fats as standard advice.

there's an abyss between "saturated fat are evil" and "eating a stick of butter every day is great for your health" but apparently the forum is looking for a science based dichotomy, which cannot exist because nutrition is all about daily intake - hence why my original post topic was about proportions and only tangentially related to saturated fat health, and why I carefully avoided to answer to the clear bait: notice how the same poster is claiming two post above that palm oil is good for health, but he doesn't provide any citation, instead pretending that everyone else does the homework for him.

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