Health and nutrition, environment and forests. Everything you need to know about palm oil, the most widely used and controversial ingredient of the moment.
Palm oil imports into Italy reached a historic record in 2014, registering a 19 per cent increase compared to the previous year: 1.7 billion kilograms. An incomprehensible invasion according to Coldiretti (Confederazione nazionale dei coltivatori diretti), given that our country is the home of extra virgin olive oil and the Mediterranean diet.
Beyond the made-in-Italy question, consumers' doubts about the spread of palm oil are both environmental and nutritional in nature. The exponential increase in plantations is fuelling deforestation in many tropical areas of the Earth, and scientific studies on the nutritional characteristics of this vegetable oil are contradictory. Let us try to shed some light on the matter.
This ingredient has drawn criticism from many quarters, accused of being widely used by the industry despite having a saturated fat content higher than that of many other oils. But is palm oil harmful to health? First of all, it should be noted that saturated fats are considered responsible for the onset of cardiovascular disease, but they are not all the same.
They are divided into short-chain (protective), medium-chain (neutral) and long-chain (harmful) saturated fats. It is precisely the latter that increase the risk of developing high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis and high cholesterol. Palm oil does indeed contain an abundance of long-chain saturated palmitic acid, but this share of harmful fats is accompanied by as much as 51.5 per cent protective unsaturated fatty acids — namely around 39 per cent monounsaturated (oleic acid, typical of olive oil) and 12 per cent polyunsaturated, mainly linoleic. By way of comparison, consider that butter contains only 21.6 per cent palmitic acid and possesses lauric and myristic acids, which are medium-chain saturated fatty acids and therefore neutral with respect to vascular risk; plus butyric acid, which is short-chain and, despite being saturated, falls among the protective fats. But it is also true that butter has only half (26.5 per cent) the protective monounsaturated fatty acids of palm oil (source: Nico Valerio).
Palm oil, therefore, even though it contains an abundance of palmitic acid, thanks to its overall composition and when it is not hydrogenated, would not raise total cholesterol. Hydrogenation is the process by which oil takes on a solid consistency and becomes richer in saturated fats; palm oil has a naturally semi-solid consistency that has the effect of making products naturally creamy, which is why it is often not hydrogenated. In its natural, raw state, it is also rich in vitamins, carotenoids and antioxidant polyphenols.
The most recent nutritional data on this ingredient reveal that during cooking it performs better than seed oil and butter because it is a fat that is stable at high temperatures, even for frying, and resistant to oxidation.
So why does Belgium's Superior Health Council recommend limiting its use and consumption due to the high saturated fatty acid content? Because scientific and nutritional studies on palm oil are controversial, yield contradictory results and are not comparable with one another, since they do not always specify precisely the form in which it was analysed: whether whole, refined or fractionated. Palm oil's best nutritional performance is indeed delivered when it is whole, because in its raw state it is rich in beta-carotene, alpha-carotene and vitamin E alpha-tocopherol. The refined product, the most widely used by the food industry, offers very few of the properties of the raw oil.
Another issue linked to palm oil concerns contamination from residues of toxic chemical substances. Palm oil is cultivated in countries that still permit the use of substances that are banned in Italy and Europe, such as DDT. The checks carried out so far have never detected residue levels above those permitted by law, but it is possible that children may be more exposed than adults to the so-called "accumulation effect" from pesticides.
It is the most widely used vegetable oil in the world. The increase in its use in the food sector has caused many environmental problems. In recent years, the number (and therefore the extent) of plantations has grown exponentially, entirely at the expense of tropical forests.
This phenomenon has developed above all in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together export around 90 per cent of all the palm oil on the global market.
In an attempt to contain or at least address the problem, in 2004 some producer companies together with environmental NGOs sat down at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (Rspo) to try to establish a minimum environmental standard for palm cultivation and curb deforestation and the loss of biodiversity.
The work led to the drafting of eight principles to be followed and to the import into Europe of the first certified palm oil in 2008, while in 2012 around 14 per cent of all oil produced (over 54 million tonnes) carried the Rspo logo. Not everyone was satisfied with the outcomes of the roundtable, as the WWF and other NGOs have pointed out. There are many areas that need to be improved, such as that on pesticides. Herbicides and other hazardous chemical substances continue to be used on plantations, and there is no control whatsoever over CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
To continue innovating and improving the Rspo certification and including parameters that make plantations and palm oil truly sustainable, WWF, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and other organisations established the Palm Oil Innovation Group (Poig), a pressure group with the aim of pushing governments and businesses to improve existing laws and the working conditions and exploitation of natural resources. Because the one, true goal is to defend the lungs of the planet: tropical forests.
The most valuable advice for consumers, therefore, is to look on the label for the Rspo logos and certification that attest to the origin from at least responsible management of the palm oil contained in the product.