Dont be fooled Palm oil is not healthy - research Coconut oil - the only oil you should use.

by Natasha Longo

Palm oil of any kind, whether it be from the fruit or kernel is not beneficial to the Earth or human health. The marketing gurus behind the largest palm oil manufacturers in the world will never give you the whole story. In fact, they are attempting to deceive international governments at every turn with false information and misrepresented data. Palm fruit oil or palm kernel oils are not healthy at all and most of the health risks are associated with the processing of which very few have been informed. The use of palm oil has skyrocketed in recent years, and at 50 million metric tons in 2010, it is the most heavily utilized vegetable oil. While consumers in India, China, and Indonesia directly buy raw palm oil for cooking and frying, in developed markets many are unaware that palm oil is used in approximately half of all packaged foods, personal care, and cleaning products.

Palm oil’s dramatic growth has occurred for good reason. The oil palm is currently the most efficient vegetable oil crop in the world. While one hectare of land can produce just 0.38 tons per year of soybean oil, 0.48 tons of sunflower oil, and 0.67 tons of rapeseed oil, that same hectare can produce more than 3.7 tons of palm oil.

High yields and low land requirements, then, make palm oil the least expensive vegetable oil in the market. Palm oil is also versatile, as it is readily usable for baking, frying, soaps, cosmetics, and biofuel. In contrast, most other vegetable oils require hydrogenation for some food uses.

Note that palm fruit oil and palm kernel oil are completely different oils with vastly different nutritional profiles. Palm fruit oil is often claimed to be highly nutritious and contains about equal amounts of saturated and unsaturated oils. Palm kernel oil is made from the kernel, or seed of the palm fruit and contains much higher amounts of saturated fat. Both are problematic for our health primarily due to processing. However, sustainability is also a major problem. Here are the 3 reasons you should stay away from any type of palm oil.

#1) Sustainability

Due to the massive worldwide backlash regarding the destruction of tropical ecosystems, every major palm oil company is now using the word “sustainable” to try and greenwash their ravaging of rain forests.

Unilever: ”Through our Sustainable Agriculture Programme, we have been working towards the sustainable cultivation of oil palms for more than ten years.”

Kellogg: ”…all of the palm oil we use today is 100 percent sustainablysourced through a combination of GreenPalm certificates, mass balance and segregated, sustainably grown supply.”

Nestle: ”…committed to traceable sustainable palm oil….by end 2012, we will achieve a total of 80% RSPO certified sustainable palm oil.”

And the list goes on through several other manufacturers who use the world “sustainable” as if it’s going out of style.

The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil was created to address huge issues of deforestation, land grabs and global warming in 2004. But the problem is, it was created by the largest palm oil producers and was supposed to set a global standard and certificate for palm o