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More and more products are marketed using olive or sunflower oils in their preparation, replacing the famous palm oil that, until a few years ago, was present in most of the prepared and pre-cooked food products. However, do you know why is palm oil so bad And what consequences does its consumption have for both health and the environment? If you want to go a little deeper into the subject, keep reading Green Ecologist and we will tell you about it.
What is palm oil and why is it used so much
Palm oil is an oil with various uses that is obtained from the palmElaeis guineensis), an original tree from West Africa and that, to this day, is cultivated in tropical and equatorial regions of the entire planet. This oil has been known since very ancient times and, in fact, it was already widely used in Equatorial Guinea for cooking and producing cosmetics many years ago.
However, its use has become popular in recent decades because it is a very efficient crop when it comes to obtaining oil, since, unlike other crops, the oil is obtained from both the seed and the fruit of the Palm. This generates a larger quantity of oil which, after being refined, is considerably increased. In this way, a very high production of this product is obtained that can be marketed at a cheap price and offers considerable economic benefits to production companies, since it is used both in the food and industrial sectors (production of industrial oils, cosmetics, biofuels, etc.).
What are the health effects of palm oil?
However, the fact that it is widely used in the food industry does not mean that it is good for your health, but simply that it is cheap. In fact, palm oil is one of the few vegetable oils that act as Saturated fats in our body. That is, their consumption is as bad as when they consume animal fats.
The most important effect it has on health is the increased LDL cholesterol (the bad guy), which entails all the cardiovascular diseases associated with said increase. These diseases include strokes, blocked arteries, hypertension, kidney problems and, above all, the possibility of heart attacks.
In this way, even if it is a cheap oil that can be used in the preparation of prepared foods, or even in the kitchen itself, it is a oil not advisable for health that, in fact, we should reduce consumption to the minimum possible, if not zero consumption.
What are the effects of consuming palm oil on the environment?
But, if the health problems associated with its consumption were few, the use of palm oil also entails a series of very serious environmental problems that make it a product to avoid also from an environmental perspective.
The main problem with the use of palm oil for the planet is that it must be cultivated and, as it is a plant of equatorial origin, the climates in which it grows best are precisely the equatorial and tropical. However, these geographical areas are also the ones that host the greatest number of forests and primary forests (those forests that are virgin and that have not been modified by the action of man). In fact, it is the main lungs of our planet, such as the Amazon or the jungles of Indonesia.
Consequently, these areas are being deforested to allocate the land to palm cultivation from which its oil is obtained. This causes the destruction of thousands and thousands of hectares of green areas of very high ecological value, since these are areas that absorb a very high amount of CO2 and are also home to numerous species of flora and fauna that are in danger of extinction, as is the case of the orangutan and the Sumatran tiger, among others.
For example, you can consult more on this topic in this other article by Green Ecologist on Deforestation of the Amazon: causes and consequences.
What can we do to solve the palm oil problem?
First of all, on a personal level, we can avoid consuming palm oil. In this way, we will protect our health and prevent an increase in demand for this product, so it will no longer be so profitable to deforest new areas of primary forests to use them for palm cultivation. This can be achieved by reading product labels and, when we see that they are made with palm oil, not directly buy them. When you put this into practice, you will notice how many products use this oil.
It is also important to avoid those that only appear to be made with "vegetable oil", but without specifying the type of vegetable in question. This is an ingenious way to avoid putting palm oil on the label, since it is legally allowed, and the consumer often associates "vegetable oil" with healthy. Despite this, if we want to be completely sure that we are not consuming palm oil, the right thing to do is to also distrust these imprecise labels.
Likewise, in the same way that we must look at the labels of the food products, we must also do it in the Cosmetic products, since these are others that can contain this type of oil, so it is important not to lower your guard with them either.
Second, once we have avoided buying products with palm oil, what we should do is give it a positive approach. That is, buying products that are made with oils that are healthy and do not seriously harm the environment. This includes oils grown and produced in the same region where we reside, which will help reduce your CO2 footprint in both production and transportation. For example, in the case of the European countries of the Mediterranean basin, without a doubt, the best option is to opt for products made with olive oil, since it is a healthy product and whose production is compatible with the objectives of agricultural sustainability .
If you want to read more articles similar to Why is palm oil so bad?, we recommend that you enter our category of Foods harmful to health.
