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.
The bad thing about palm oil isn’t how unhealthy it is (because what it is replacing isn’t healthy either); the bad thing is that palm farmers have destroyed many thousands of square miles of rain forest. When you fly from Singapore to Jakarta, virtually all rain forest you used to fly over is now palm. It’s an unmitigated environmental disaster.
Do you have an alternative to suggest that’s less ecologically damaging? I keep hearing complaints about palm oil but I’ve never heard an alternative suggestion that doesn’t involve even more land use.
You could not eat food with palm oil in it. There’s a suggestion.
Nothing I eat has palm oil in it. I don’t specifically avoid it, but I do avoid processed foods generally, and palm oil is only in processed food.
Avoiding processed foods is certainly a valid option, though not one I see gaining popularity anytime soon.
However, the average detractor isn’t suggesting sweeping diet changes, they’re suggesting buying products using other plant oils, as if that wouldn’t cause even more deforestation if everybody did it.
I think the problem is that all the global “fat” supply has gone into palm oil since it’s low cost and tastes nice, so the scale of it’s production make the problem worse…
so even if the alternatives are worse on paper, splitting the production between them could mitigate the damage maybe?
btw I found this quite comprehensive study
Moving half of current palm oil usage to other oils would require about 250M acres of land. Anybody got a spare country or two lying around?
Anyway, production is already split. As I mentioned in another comment, palm oil currently accounts for about 40% of plant oils, while using less than 10% of the land.
You’re right, but if we used butter instead, the necessary cows would surely require yet more space.
Its replacement depends on the product you’re trying to make. Like, they could not remove the cocoa butter from chocolate, for example.
Which reminds me, someone gave me a bunch of chocolate bars with a large “rainforest alliance” logo on it that had palm oil as the second ingredient. They’re inedible.
It’s not a choice between palm oil or butter. You can create a vegan pie easily. Yummie yummie.
Isn’t palm oil vegan?
It depends on your definition of veganism. There is no animal product in it, but to use it in the quantities we do requires the destruction of a lot of habitat that certain animals require to survive.
Yeah, people constantly confuse veganism for a diet.
Nope, it contains bits and pieces of orangutans.
That doesn’t sound right. But I don’t know enough about orangutans to dispute it.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/deforestation-borneo-slowing-regulation-remains-key
Since veganism is mainly about ethicality, i’d guess not.
I had an argument about palm oil with a vegan who said that I was against it because I supported Big Dairy…
Only when it comes to animals. You can be an almond milk drinking vegan despite the amount of water necessary to make an almond. You can be a palm oil vegan despite the amount of habitation destruction necessary for palm oil to be economically viable.
Like, killing them / driving them away, for a cocoa plantage?
i think so since it comes from a tree
If only vegetable oils existed…
You mean like palm oil?
Different use cases.
Fats that are solid ( or at least not kept liquid) are not directly comparable to oils. They fulfill a different function in baked goods. In particular, pie crust with vegetable oil would fail totally. It wouldn’t hold up.
Mind you, if you don’t object to hydrogenated oils, they can do the job. Yay margarine? But you can’t just dump 10 grams of canola into your biscuits and expect the results to look, taste, or feel like a biscuit. You’d get something, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Palm oil doesn’t tase good at all so you can just as well use margarine made from sunflower or canola oil.
It’s pretty tasteless overall.
And when it comes right down to it, hydrogenated oils are their own nightmare. There’s really no perfect choices for every person in every situation.
Like, lard and tallow work even better than butter in some applications, including some desserts. But then you run into the health side of things and vegetarians aren’t going to use them.
I personally don’t like palm oil either. I find it unpleasant for mouth feel. I’m just saying that it fills a role that other things don’t, and does it in a way that’s a different set of problems.