Palm oil

Updated article : 07/11/2017

Oil Palm is used in the food industry (80%), cosmetics (19%) and Bio fuels (1%). Its very low cost of production, its ability to preserve food and make them fluffy make this product the key component of industrial.

Palm oil should instead bear the name of “Palm fat” because it is hard at room temperature because of its richness in saturated fatty acids (that is much higher than animal fats like butter, for example).

Found in a wide variety of products such as biscuits, confectionery, industrial rolls, chocolate bars, cereals, margarine, ice cream etc. (but also in some soaps, perfumes, cosmetics…).

As the trans fat, saturated fats also raise bad cholesterol. So add fat (Here palm oil) in a diet already rich in saturated fat is bad for your health.

Prefer rather polyunsaturated fats (Omega 3, for example) that improve the blood pressure, reduce the accumulation of plaques and especially to lower bad cholesterol levels.

More concretely, the family of polyunsaturated foods are some fish (salmon, Trout, herring, sardine …), linseed oil, ground flax seed…

Course should be to limit the consumption of trans fats and saturated emphasizing monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats for your health in General and especially for your heart.

Not only bad for health, Palm oil is also an ecological disaster :

Indeed to meet a growing demand (first vegetable oil consumed in the world), oil palm plantations (Elaeis guineensis) replace little by little forests of Southeast Asia and Central Africa. This deforestation ravage the bio diversity introduced in tropical forests and threatens a considerable number of plant and animal species for the benefit of a monoculture. This disaster is done by fire and also causes a very significant releases of CO2 in the atmosphere (the Indonesia has become the third largest producer of CO2 from the Earth because of forest fires).

The ravages of deforestation, here in Kalimantan 2014, in the concession Karya Makmur Amadi cleared for the construction of a palm oil plantation. (Credits: BAY Ismoyo / AFP)

“All the 10 seconds, an area of forest equivalent to a football field disappearing in Indonesia. The extension of the plantations of Oil Palm is, by far, the first cause. In Europe, Palm oil has become, in a few years, indispensable to the manufacture of many consumer products.” source : www.amisdelaterre.org

The book “The scandal of the apes for oil” published by friends of the Earth says that without urgent action, trade of palm oil would cause l’extinction of the only great apes of Asia here 12 years !

This vegetable oil is in a product on 10 in our supermarkets according to a recent study.

Note all the same gesture of the Casino group which withdraw palm oil from all these Casino brand products following a new controversy in France on Palm oil.

Everything is not perfect because the Casino brand products were likely to contain GMOs, food additives and residues of pesticides. This is still an initiative that deserves to be encouraged.

A video on the impact of deforestation on Palm oil :