'This could be the holy grail to replace palm oil' – research team | Hacker News Reader

'This could be the holy grail to replace palm oil' – research team

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsswores20 comments

> And with 80% less saturated fat [...], they are also hailing PALM-ALT as a significantly healthier option.

Doesn't sound healthy at all.

Can you go into some detail as to why?

Because there is plenty of evidence that saturated fats are much better than the polyunsaturated fats that will be replacing them in this arrangement.

Because people are tired of the "food science"-agriculture-industrial complex selling them magic bullets to a health epidemic of our own making than end up just getting more people obese every time.

Because nutrition is one of the most fraudulent sciences at present, and no one can agree on which 90% of the literature is wrong.

Because the last 70 times articles in popular nutrition were published beginning with "This could be the holy grail to ..." they were wrong.

except you are really sure about saturated fats.

Saturated fats convert to cholesterol, high values of which is a common health problem. So this sounds like a great health improvement?

The only possible downside I see in this very thin reporting is the usual feel of ickiness some folks get out of an appeal to nature fallacy.

There is emerging evidence that high cholesterol on its own is not sufficient to cause heart disease. See https://cholesterolcode.com/ .

> Saturated fats convert to cholesterol, high values of which is a common health problem.

High blood cholesterol levels is a common health problem, but it doesn't follow that consuming too much cholesterol causes high blood cholesterol levels—it could be that the body can normally handle any amount of cholesterol/cholesterol precursor consumption within a wide range, but a dysfunction in the regulation mechanism results in health problems. And in fact, double-blind trials seem to support this theory:

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIR.00000000000...

"Evidence from observational studies conducted in several countries generally does not indicate a significant association [of dietary cholesterol] with cardiovascular disease risk."

> An appeal to nature fallacy

The theory of natural selection predicts that human metabolism is best adapted to consuming food similar to what was available for most of our evolutionary history.

GP said nothing about dietary cholesterol. It's well researched that high levels of saturated fats increases blood cholesterol, though. The conversion is dietary saturated fat to blood serum cholesterol.

Having lived in SE Asia for a while, it's hard to defend the palm oil industry. Cutting down rainforests, burning peat lands which transform into huge wildfires, haze, monocrop plantations as far as the eye can see. That's just the growing side of the business. The milling side is pretty bad too, dumping effluent from the mills.

All that being said, the Malaysians and Indonesians are very nice people. It'd be sad to see them adversely impacted.

More info from the university involved here: https://www.qmu.ac.uk/services-for-business-and-industry/sme...

Did not notice how much cheaper is it? As that is what really matters. Not the health benefits.

I actively seek to buy products containing Palm oil. Why?

From my understanding. Saturated fats are highly stable and the other ones sold are not and therefore require more processing. In the end, and due to reasons too long to write here, I believe saturated fats are the healthiest alternative for use in packaged products.

We’re being funneled into eating these polyunsaturated fats that in their on the shelf state, have no resemblence to anything humans have eaten in the past.

It’s not like were homomodernus, were still homosapien and it’s gonna take millennia for the human race to adapt to these foods. Not 10 years because climate change told us so.

On the soap side of things, Genomatica is already scaling up to replace palm oil for many of the major producers.

TL;DR: Something a university research team made, they labelled PALM-ALT:

> It is made from a by-product from the linseed industry, plus natural fibre and rapeseed oil.

Yeah I am going to stay away.

Massive amounts of palm and coconut oil are used for soaps and lotions. Any reason it wouldn’t be great to replace those?

better to externalize the costs of your decisions than take a minute risk that the franken-palm-oil will zombify us all.

I stay away from palm oil and I love coconut oil. Not going to use some weird concoction until overwhelming evidence (lifetimes) convinces me otherwise.

I wasn’t talking about food, but anyway in terms of food Nearly all of food these days contains many ingredients that have not had lifetimes of evidence to back up their safety. Even basic foods have changed substantially from a lifetime ago. If that makes it a weird concoction then that’s all the supermarket sells.

I hate articles that hide key topic.

I am not spending time on an article that is trying to hook me into reading. Articles exist to share knowledge, not obfuscate it.

Why "This" in the headline?" Why not "<ProductName> could be the..."?

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