Someone raised the subject of palm oil - good or bad? - in the LCHF forum, and I thought there might be some general interest in the subject.
Palm oil makes the news occasionally because it's associated with rainforest destruction and "unhealthy fats" (saturated fat). As with most things, these issues are far more complicated than the talking heads suggest.
Let's take the environmental side first. The main product of land clearance is timber. Ripping up 100 hectares of old-growth hardwood and getting it out of the country via traders with the right connections (yes, there are fences who sell wood!) will make approximately as much money as the oilpalm plantation that follows it. A tonne of generic hardwood sells for about $2000; a rough average would be $250,000 per hectare, gross. Some species yield 5-10 times that price. After costs - land purchase, licenses, bribes, labour, transport - you could easily walk away with $20m in your pocket from a moderately-sized rainforest raid. And what then?
Well, even the world's worst governments recognise that leaving 100 hectares to turn to desert is not an ideal outcome; they discovered that the international hemp-sandal brigade make slightly less fuss if they pretend the clearance was done for agricultural reasons - because who could protest growing crops so that poor people can have jobs and hospitals?
That's not what happens, of course. The three most common alternative possibilities are soybeans, pasture, and oilpalm. Soybeans and pasture are low-yielding options that are fundamentally unsuited to ex-rainforest soil. You can force a yield with technology, but soil erosion is inevitable. After abandonment, the forest might regenerate eventually, but usually the land is damaged beyond repair and ends up as a sparse scrub or prairie.
Oilpalm turns out to be the least-bad option. Unlike soybeans, it's a perennial; it's planted once and left alone. There is no ploughing (which is incredibly destructive in the tropics), and few chemicals. It is always grown with a covercrop that protects the soil and restores fertility. The explicit intent of the plantation is to emulate a young forest ecosystem. It has very little species diversity, but at least it's not desert. When it's abandoned (20-25 years after establishment) the surrounding forest will rapidly encroach and take over.
The gross yield from oilpalm is about $25,000/hectare/year, or $2.5m/year for our hypothetical 100ha, of which $1m is cost-of-capital, labour, maintenance, and taxes. So $30m over the plantation's lifetime. Notice how this compares with the first-year timber harvest.
The indisputable issue with clearances for oilpalm is habitat destruction. However, this would happen regardless: the plantation owners want the timber first; the oilpalm is just icing on the cake.
You could make a case that buying palm oil is the environmentally-sound option. I won't stretch the point that far, but consider: if you buy the vegetable oils touted by the health mafia instead, you're supporting an equally-unsound farming model. Soybeans, canola, sunflowers and the like are grown conventionally: ploughing, pesticides and herbicides. Those crops create big deserts of dead, acidified soil in your own backyard. Their economic output is far lower than palm oil because they have very low oil yields: about 1 tonne per hectare for canola compared to 5+ tonnes for oil palm. In other words, oil palm requires only 20% of the land for a given quantity of oil. Farmers growing "healthy" polyunsaturated oilseed rely on government subsidy to turn a profit. So why grow them? Again, the reasons are complicated, but it basically boils down to peer pressure and inertia: dad grew canola on this here land and took the gubmint grants, so dammit I'm going to do it too.
In fact, I'll suggest that the most environmentally-sound source of food oils is pigs, ruminants, and poultry. Left to do piggy and bovine things, these creatures maintain soil fertility and can be integrated with profitable crops. Our forefathers knew this. Back before fossil fuels, some farms kept all biomass on-farm for the animals and exported only meat, milk, and the like, because transport costs ∝ volume, and meat volume is relatively small.
But of course, as we all know, saturated fats cause heart disease. It turns out that people in (say) Malaysia and Indonesia have CVD rates comparable to countries where polyunsaturated vegetable oils are preferred and dietary fat is lower. But hey, let's not let reality interfere with a nice simple theory.
I'm a big fan of eating what nature provides. If nature gives you palm oil, and steadfastly refuses to grow olives, perhaps your best option is to eat palm oil. There are actually wonderful agricultural models for growing the stuff, where oilpalm and coconut is integrated into an almost-natural forest of useful tree crops and annuals. I have several three-year-old coconut trees growing alongside two dozen other species for food, biomass, and animal habitat. These methods are a far cry from thousand-acre soybean monocrops, or even from the artificial-looking standard oilpalm or coconut plantation.
It's a pity so much of modern environmental and food policy is based around theories produced by people tapping away on their computers in comfortable university offices. If they got outside in the sunshine and looked around a little, they might have some more sensible ideas.
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I read that palm oil was wrongfully vilified by the vegetable oil industry. I never use vegetable oil and on occasion I will use palm oil. I always keep some in the cupboard.
Funnily enough, palm oil is making a comeback as a superfood. Google "red virgin palm oil" and you'll find all sorts of very expensive "100% organic" versions. Unrefined palm oil is pretty common where I live, and it's a pleasant-flavoured oil with good characteristics for cooking. It's especially good for high-temp frying and for curries. My view is that the processed-food industry adopted it not because it's cheap (AFAIK, the bulk price is not much different to Canola) but because it has excellent culinary properties.
It's entirely possible that the PUFA industry deliberately attempted to steamroller the palm oil producers (which wouldn't have been difficult, given that they are guilty of making a right mess) in order to keep their own inferior products at the top of the heap.
But it's OK to destroy habitats and forests in temperate climates?
All agriculture involves destroying whatever natural ecosystem was originally on the land. The aim, surely, is to minimize the land area being used, and the extent of the destruction.
It didn't read to me like TAD is "excusing" it - choice between something and (literally) nothing unless world bans the timber .... how likely is that?
Indeed, but my point was that palm oil plantations, while they might not be permaculture by the book, are at least within shouting distance. What I probably didn't explain well is this: the people who plant palm oil are not always the same people who clear the forest. Often what happens is that someone will get a logging license and then sell the clearcut land (they've got what they wanted and don't have any further interest). If someone puts palm oil there, then at least there's a chance it'll be forest again 50 years later.
The crazy thing is that I'm pretty much with you, right up until this final conclusion.
"It's a pity so much of modern environmental and food policy is based around theories produced by people tapping away on their computers in comfortable university offices."
Seriously, what world do you live in? What I see are out of control greedy corporations buying up farmland so they can grow GMO soy year after year, depleting the soil until it's more like concrete than the fertile, rich, living loam it once was (yes, I remember it well). All so they can feed it to dairy and meat factories full of animals that never experience anything natural. What egg-heads designed that? Seriously, you think any of those corporations listen to anyone but accountants and tax attorneys? Not in my world. These are the guys who fight against the idea that "saturated fats cause heart disease" (your words, written sarcastically). So forgive me if I mistook you for one of them.
No, I'd rather live in a world in which all the mega-farms are turned back into small family farms, growing and rotating a wide variety of crops, and even bringing back the chickens, pigs, & whatever animals those small farmers want as long as they don't cage them up in factories again. All the subsidies should go away so that decisions are based on real costs, both to the consumers and farmers.
I predict that this animal-product-producing arrangement would never be able to keep up with the world's growing meat-devouring population, so the price of meat would go way up and a lot more people would become WFPB. Yes, partly due to the scarcity of meat, but also because everyone else will see the wealthy over-eating it and getting sick and dying early from it, as the wealthy always have. That's much better than the current status-quo in which everyone can afford lots of meat 3 or 4 times a day, and everyone is sick and dying early from it.
I also predict that everyone will eventually be vegan, but I think a transitional step will be necessary, or at least likely.
Good question. Are you American? If you have a chance, you should sit in on the agriculture course lectures. Anyone who currently runs a chicken mega-factory or a soybean plantation almost certainly sat in one of those lecture halls as an impressionable teenager, taking notes. As did the ones who decide to do postgrad courses and research. Yes, the accountants and tax attorneys (don't they count as egg-heads?) get a big say in what "works" and what doesn't. But eventually, all the manure flows downhill, into that lecture hall, where young farmers are trained to do as they're told.
Politicians support all this because their advisers - people with PhDs who are good at churning out powerpoint presentations and white papers - tell them that it's fundamentally Right. Yes, of course the industry reps also take them for expensive dinners, but most people don't like feeling that they've been bought and sold. You have to believe in what you're doing in order to do it with any enthusiasm.
The small farms you describe are incredibly efficient. If humanity does move in that direction, there's no reason whatsoever why meat would become inaccessible or overpriced. I buy organic/free-range chickens myself from a local producer at a per-kilo cost lower than the supermarket.
My prediction is slightly different: real farmers will eventually get their act together, buy up failing factory farms, convert them back to mixed agriculture, and set up efficient direct-marketing operations. The cage-em-up-and-sell-em-cheap generation of farmers are old, tired, and they're sick of it all. The younger generation are starting to look behind the curtain, and they've found out the Wizard is a fraud. Big Ag has some tough times ahead.
I think you must be one of them ethicals that just makes up stories to try and make people feel uncomfortable to eat meat.
All it does is make people laugh when you say the wealthy are over eating it and there dying from it.
I am a what you call wealthy and so are my friends and family. We eat meat, not devour it and we all seem to be doing fine on it. Can't work out why you guys get so twisted on meat.
Enjoy your life, be happy..you live longer for it.
The wealthy, statistically speaking, are usually a lot healthier than the average Joe, and always have been. That's not to say they never die of overindulgence and underwork, but being poor is a very good predictor of early death from CVD.
This probably isn't the place to go into cause-and-effect, but since the rich DO tend to eat more meat than the dirt-poor, the facile conclusion would be that meat makes you healthier
Yes, the wealthy usually pay someone to think for them and to tell them what they want to hear because a little effort is too much bother. If that's you, then everything is fine. The Titanic's deck was designed to tilt.
This is fascinating to me, as history is very different from what most people believe. In general, the wealthy have had excess time & money to come up with (or be sold) all sorts of crazy ideas. In-breeding by the ancient pharaohs of Egypt resulted in grotesque deformities and many early deaths. But they believed themselves to be gods, and only a god should ever touch another god.
More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates described gout as a disease of kings; only the wealthy could afford the ‘rich’ foods. Gout is caused by needle-sharp crystals of uric acid in our joints. Uric acid comes from purines, which are the breakdown product of genetic material—DNA, the foundation of all life. So, there is no such thing as a purine-free diet, but foods do vary in their purine content. It was long thought that people with gout just needed to stay away from all high-purine foods, whether from animals, like organ meats, or plants, like beans. Yes, all uric acid comes from the breakdown of purines, so limiting meat makes sense, but plant sources have been completely exonerated, though there are still some guidelines continuing to disseminate those outdated recommendations. Not only has the intake of purine-rich plants not been associated with high uric acid levels, but the vegetables gout sufferers are specifically told to stay away from—mushrooms, peas, beans, lentils, and cauliflower—were actually found to be protective. Foods rich in fiber, folate, and vitamin C protect against uric acid buildup and gout. Fiber, for example, has been recognized as having a role in binding uric acid in the gut for excretion.
The kings and other royalty in the Middle Ages were told (and sold) all sorts of crazy theories. They were the ones who could afford bloodletting, for example. They were the ones who could afford to paint their faces, necks, and hands with white (lead) paints in order to look healthier while it poisoned them. I could go on for hours, but you get the point.
Today, wealthy people take things like statins and brag about how many stents they have, then convince themselves that riding around in golf carts and swinging sticks now and then constitutes exercise. And they think they're doing well by living a little longer when they're actually just dying longer. You hear that the average lifespan has been increasing steadily over the last 100 years, but what they don't explain to you is that almost all of that increase is due to improved infant mortality, largely the result of better hygiene in the hospitals. For that knowledge, you have to dig a little.
One final "story" about our world today:
When Colin Campbell was a young doctor in the 1960s, he traveled to the Philippines to help feed hungry children. Interestingly, he found that the citizens who could afford to purchase meat were the ones bearing children who were susceptible to liver cancer.
Studying his findings from the Philippines in the labs at Cornell University, Dr. Campbell found that while cancer may start in our genes, the growth of cancer cells in our bodies is determined by what we put in our mouths.
The late 1950s brought on the dawn of the fast food era and post WW2 supermarkets, which were filled with “convenience foods.” As the number of fast food chains grew, so too did the rates of cancer.
In his global research, another doctor, Dr. Esselstyn, found stark differences in the correlations between poor health and the intake of animals and animal by-products:
In 1958, Japan only had 18 autopsy-proven deaths caused by prostate cancer. That same year, there were over 14,000 recorded deaths by prostate cancer in the United States, which had a population twice that of Japan’s.
In 1978, breast cancer was much lower in Kenya than it was in the United States—82x lower to be exact.
In the early 1970s, the risk for heart diseases in rural China was 12x lower than in the United States, and it was rarely encountered at all in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
The connection? These countries were not eating a Western diet, consisting of meat and dairy products.
You may ignore all of this information as mere "stories", and you may survive to a ripe old age of 80 or so. But the Millennials are joining the plant-based movement in ever-increasing numbers, and I believe that living well and living well past 90 will be normal for those who do.
If you did, thank you for reading and considering this information.
PS. This post consists of some completely original writing, as well as information from various blogs and web pages. I've saved it so that I don't have to re-create it each time I need it. Feel free to do the same.
Always tricky when a world health authority, WHO, is convinced the thing you support increases disease big time, Table 10, palmitic acid is the main ingredient in palm oil. who.int/dietphysicalactivit...
Interesting document. I'd not seen that before. This is precisely what I was referring to with my comment about cloistered academics churning out policy advice based on their pet theories instead of careful observation of what happens in the real world.
I consider myself a fairly level-headed person and I don't like to use words like "conspiracy". So when the WHO cherry-picks a few 30-year-old studies, long since discredited or at least unreplicated, to support a global rollout of dietary advice, and completely ignores mountains of solid science that contradicts their position, I don't know what to call it. Wilful ignorance? The Peter Principle? Deliberate malice? I just can't begin to guess what's going on there.
Notice that document barely even mentions hard outcomes like death, disability, or QALYs. It just goes on and on about cholesterol, in terms that make a mockery of our current understanding of biochemistry of cholesterol. It's taken as read that if you reduce circulating cholesterol, you reduce heart disease. The fact that this doesn't actually happen in practice is completely ignored. Thus the advice about eggs is still in there, even though most of the world's health authorities have quietly abandoned that idea, since study after study showed it to be entirely false.
Palmitic acid is one of your body's preferred fuel sources; it's synthesized from excess carbohydrates for storage. It's abundant in meat for the same reason it's abundant in human bodyfat. So what the WHO are suggesting is this: a substance your body deliberately constructs, for a well-understood purpose, is inherently harmful. Which brings to mind Sagan's principle: "extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence".
It kills a lot of people also, see below, big data set, risks up there not far off mining or deep sea fishing. Implicated in metastasis also. Palmitic acid is in lots of things but its an order of magnitude higher in palm oil at 44%. Then separately there was the chocolate breakfast spread scare due to allegedly carcinogenic by products from when its processed at high temperatures. Needs more research. Interesting how researchers use it to make rats obese and in the west we ate little of it a few decades ago but now we eat kilos of it a year sneaked into food and many are obese. It could be the new tobacco but as always the truth rarely gets out.
Oh good grief. Every time I read a study like the one in the NCBI link, it makes me think that there really ought to be some sort of test before dieticians are allowed to do studies, just to make sure they understand how science works. 99% of them don't.
What they've done there is assumed that saturated fat causes heart disease, and then gone looking for a correlation to "prove" that palm oil causes heart disease.
This is a perfectly valid method for laying the groundwork for a hypothesis, but it's not how you definitively link outcome A with cause B.
They found their correlation (by carefully selecting their data), but have not demonstrated causation.
Lots of things changed while consumption of palm oil increased in the countries under investigation. To take a mundane example, a lot of the poor got richer, and what they did with their money is this: they bought more junk food. How do I know? Because I watched it happen. The fact that some of the junk food contained palm oil is neither here nor there: that's what's known as "drawing a target around the bullseye". There are other well-understood mechanisms that lead from junk food to disease.
What the researchers should have done is this:
1) Find people whose diets have not changed in any respect except palm oil consumption (either up or down). That would be hard, so they didn't bother.
2) Look for populations where palm oil consumption has increased but CVD has not. If there are no such places, then the hypothesis is unchallenged; otherwise, it's definitively wrong. I did a quick google search, and it appears no such study has even been attempted.
Hi, I was very surprised to see this discussion on health benefits of palm oil. It definitely doesn’t benefit the widelife in the areas of rain forest that have been cleared for its production.
We should only buy sustainable palm oil, the WWF have made a statement to this effect.
I’m trying to avoid it as much as I can but because of poor labelling I know I’m not avoiding it completely.
Do the WWF have any comment on the relative merits of buying unsustainable Canola, and the habitat destruction involved in growing it?
Don't get me wrong here. I'm as upset about uncontrolled logging as anyone else. I'm just pointing out that the issues are a lot more nuanced than vested interests (on either side of the fence) would have you believe.
How many little brown birds or fieldmice are worth one orangutan? Because that's the tradeoff. Canada produces 9mT of Canola on 9.2 million hectares. Malaysia produces twice as much palm oil on half the land area. Newer oil palm varieties can produce 60-70% more.
Deciding not to buy palm oil means more habitats destroyed in temperate climates, unless we start thinking outside the box - that is, until we start adopting more civilized methods of growing food. The uncomfortable fact is that the average oilpalm plantation is ahead of the game in terms of soil conservation and productivity.
As for genuinely sustainable palm oil: you're unlikely to ever see it, because small family farms tending to 20 or 30 trees without pesticides/herbicides don't have access to international markets.
Haven’t read anything about canola oil, sorry, it’s just everything that had hydrogenated fat in it now has palm oil. You’re quite right we do need to think outside the box. 😊
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Can You Recommend Inexpensive, Oil-Free Papadums?
EV Olive oil has antibacterial qualities and is good for hand and skin protection. 
