After having talked about it in some articles, I return to the issue of palm oil, after a large part of Italians woke up from the nightmare of palm oil and from a mass demonization that in some ways had and has ridicule. For others not. In recent months, articles have sprung up that ridiculed this demonization: given that any demonization of a food is ridiculous in itself, often the arguments used to ridicule those who raised the alarm against palm oil were not enough to categorize fear. palm oil like nonsense. In short: the truth lies in the middle, and in this article we will see why on the one hand it is stupid to demonize anything that contains palm oil because palm oil is bad for you; and on the other hand it is equally naïve not to worry about it at all.

Is palm oil bad for you?
1) Palm oil is a saturated fat, but it doesn’t hurt as it is saturated. It is also not a fully saturated fat. It was once thought that saturated fats increase the risk of cardiovascular health, but today we tend to prefer some saturated fats to others. For example, coconut oil, a totally saturated oil unlike palm oil, is known to contain medium-chain fatty acids which are beneficial for metabolism. So the question has never been only: palm oil is bad as a saturated fat, if anything, palm oil is bad because it contains palmitic acid. And palmitic acid has been at the center of a series of studies that have highlighted its risk for cardiovascular health .The latest is this, from a few days ago.

2) Palm oil has not been banned or prohibited: this is the lever of the articles that ridicule its demonization, or downsize it. It is not public enemy number one and there has not been a position taken by the institutions, but only the presence of some studies, which however do not justify the alert. On the contrary. Being saturated, it is perfect for frying, and for the long-term preservation of foods that with other oils, for example polyunsaturated, would tend to go rancid. Now, it is clear that between a product cooked with an oil that does not go rancid and a rancid one, I vote for the former.

3) Palm oil should also be avoided for environmental issues:  and these are there, but it may also be that we worry excessively about the cultivation of palm oil when we know little or nothing about intensive cultivation of another type. Quinoa and African perch also have their nice dark side in terms of the environment and the exploitation of human resources. But since there is no information (or rather, there is, but it is not news), we do not talk about it. In addition, having created an alarm meant that sustainable crops and harvests began.

4) Palm oil hurts because it is refined: here Bressanini is right ( I quote his post on facebook “Refined logic” , but he talked about it far and wide both in his blog and in his books), when he says that a refined food is not harmful in itself. Guys, that’s the chemistry. Palmitic acid will have the same effect if we take it in refined oil as in red palm oil (which in the meantime has dropped in price, perhaps because demand has increased). Rather, red palm oil is an interesting source of beta-carotene, perhaps one of the richest foods in beta-carotene, compared to other whole foods that have little or no advantage over their refined alternative (see whole salt). But that’s not to say that refined palm oil is the devil.

But then, how to behave? The problem is the quantity, not the food. If I buy snacks, snacks, cookies, baked goods, spreads and ice cream and eat this stuff for 80% of my daily diet, maybe I’ll get a lot of palmitic acid. If I eat Nutella for breakfast, and for the rest I don’t eat other products, no. Unless you eat a jar of Nutella a day and every day.
In short, it is the quantity that does the damage.