Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!
It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire “butter-like” fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I’m not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!
- traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
- palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
- contains memories of butter
I’m sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.
starlinguk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The bad thing about palm oil isn’t how unhealthy it is (because what it is replacing isn’t healthy either); the bad thing is that palm farmers have destroyed many thousands of square miles of rain forest. When you fly from Singapore to Jakarta, virtually all rain forest you used to fly over is now palm. It’s an unmitigated environmental disaster.
ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
You’re right, but if we used butter instead, the necessary cows would surely require yet more space.
notsosure@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s not a choice between palm oil or butter. You can create a vegan pie easily. Yummie yummie.
starlinguk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Its replacement depends on the product you’re trying to make. Like, they could not remove the cocoa butter from chocolate, for example.
Which reminds me, someone gave me a bunch of chocolate bars with a large “rainforest alliance” logo on it that had palm oil as the second ingredient. They’re inedible.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If only vegetable oils existed…
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Do you have an alternative to suggest that’s less ecologically damaging? I keep hearing complaints about palm oil but I’ve never heard an alternative suggestion that doesn’t involve even more land use.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You could not eat food with palm oil in it. There’s a suggestion.
Nothing I eat has palm oil in it. I don’t specifically avoid it, but I do avoid processed foods generally, and palm oil is only in processed food.
mattreb@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
I think the problem is that all the global “fat” supply have gone into palm oil since it’s low cost and tastes nice, so the scale of it’s production make the problem worse…
so even if the alternatives are worse on paper, splitting the production between them could mitigate the damage maybe?
btw I found this quite comprehensive study