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Comment on This Apple Lie at the grocery store

The authors do not note any conflicts of interest The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It’s like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the invironment than electric cars written by an American.

They themselves admit in the opening abstract that “Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil.” I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.

Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It’s the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.

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jak@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports.

That’s a valid point, but it could be that they’re looking at the global reaction to something they’ve consumed locally for generations with consternation and wanted to investigate it.

I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.

That feels like it might have sounded different in your head or I’m not understanding what you mean. There have been many examples of an incredibly unhealthy thing being very mainstream (lead, more than once, but also arsenic, uranium, and mercury, for some of the most egregious examples, but pharmaceutical history is also full of this), so I don’t know why you would want to default to the mainstream on this if that’s what you did mean.

whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category

This is also a fair criticism, and I wish there were more research.

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Brokkr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
When they refer the mainstream information, they are referring to non peer reviewed literature. Based on your last paragraph, it seems that you would also prefer to use peer reviewed studies to make conclusions.

I’m not going to entertain the idea that a person’s country of origin precludes them from doing meaningful research on a topic. Instead, we should critique the methods and the sources that they used.

You also brought up soybean oil as a concern. I looked that one up too: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0899900721002057

This article shows that replacing saturated fats in a person’s diet with soybean oil leads to the same results as if they had used another unsaturated fat. This is the expected result from such a dietary change. Do you have more information about the health concerns of soybean oil that you could share?

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AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

one of the largest producers of palm oil,

They produce less than 2% of global production, and are actually importers of palm oil, not exporters. Your ‘largest producers’ statement is as disingenuous as the packaging you’re complaining about.

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