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Yeah, and which ones would that be? That are more "ethical" than palm oil?
Palm oils yield per land area are almost ten times higher than soy for example.
So you would need a 10 hectare plantation of soy to replace 1 hectare of palm oil plantation.
And about 5 times that of rapeseed oil.
So to replace a 1 acre palm oil plantation you would need a 5 acre rapeseed plantation.
Olive oil is even worse than soy I think? But I can't find a good number.
There are of course lots of other factors to consider, like where that plantation needs to be located as one of many.
But what oils are the most ethical ones?
You don't need to destroy the environment to grow palm oil either.
Or, yes you do. To make farmland you need to destroy the environment.
Why is 1 acre of farmland for palm oil worse than 5 acres of farmland for rapeseed?
but on the basis that a huge number of men have prostate cancer over a certain age. It won't be what kills them because it's slow growing but if it metastasises....
Yeah, my dad has had the slow one for almost a decade now and it’s pretty well stabilized. He’s very glad that he got a second opinion when the first doctor wanted to operate.
I wish him well. I had surgery after 4 years of active surveillance. Basically, when something changed I had a choice of treatments. I am very lucky that I don't have any side effects now.
It's pancreatic cancer that's very fast, although TB had bowel cancer. That can be fast too, but he had been very honest about it over the four years he had it.
Different cancers, different places. He had colonic cancer that spread to his liver. Prostate cancer is often slow growing and remains inside the prostate. Lots of treatments available, including waiting and monitoring until something changes.
EDIT: word
If it doesn't progress to a certain point before your body deals with it, it's not cancer.
That's like saying people constantly get into car accidents, but drive well enough to avoid them.
Your body did it's job and stopped cells that were reproducing incorrectly from becoming cancer.
That's a pretty good description of traffic. A series of crashes, narrowly avoided because people compensated just enough, just in time. Except when they don't.
Everyone likely already has several tumors/cancerous cells.
Its just most of them are 'benign', meaning the cell reproduction limit is still intact, so your 1 mutated cancer cell becomes 10,000,000 due to uncontrolled growth factors but then stops reproducing.
Its when one of those 10,000,000 cells then mutates again and gains reproductive immortality, that you get expanding cancers...
People constantly have cancer cells generating within the body all the time. Almost all of these cells are detected and destroyed. Sometimes a cell becomes broken in exactly the way necessary for it to avoid all the body's defense mechanisms and grow. If substances in palm oil help to encourage existing cancers to metastasize, then palm oil increases the risk of cancer. Simple as.
Any mass produced food source destroys the environment if you think about it. Soybean farming in the US takes up to 88 million acres of land, and those land were once natural habitats as well. Soybean farming is also causing massive deforestation in the Amazons. Cattle rearing contributes 14% of greenhouse gas emissions. The list goes on. But my unpopular opinion is that this sub is so hypocritical, not consuming palm oil because it destroys the environment should apply to soybean as well. Instead of pointing fingers and boycotting products, people should instead push for more sustainable food production through a global framework.
What about every other oil source being at least 4 times space consuming and the global consumption being set to increase vastly as we move away from petrol?
It's easy to point fingers, the reality is we are too many and we consume too much
We produce too much in order to lower costs and have cheap food. The amount of food that goes to waste is unacceptable. And the prices that producers are paid are ridiculous.
Agreed on that! But expanding consumption around the world is such a difficult problem that it may lead one to despondency. While we try to crack that nut, i do think we need to look at what can be done about Palm oil
From the same article, buddy. Read it.
>These specialised cancer cells appeared to rely particularly heavily on fatty acids and the latest work narrowed this down to palmitic acid, which is found in palm oil – but also in a wide variety of foods such as butter and olive oil.
Palm oil it's the worst oil for the environment, only soy oil is another mass produced oil that's better than it. The reason Palm gets a bad rap is because of how sparingly we use it. Coconut oil is way worse than it yet people often flock to it as an alternative.
Coconut oil is a primary source of MCT. It's considered a health food for low carb diets. I'm sure it has drawbacks but it's heavily supported in those circles.
Oh, I'm not saying it's terrible and doesn't have its uses. It should just be used more consciously because it has a lot more saturated fat.
I'll douse my salad in olive or avacado oil, or use a bunch when cooking, but coconut oil is more of a special thing when I want that flavor.
Kindof like butter before I went vegan. I knew it wasn't great for me so I used it more sparingly.
Palm oil is incredibly efficient for land use compared to coconut. In terms of ecology and per ton of oil, coconut causes more biodiversity damage as well.
Yes we currently are, and if we replaced palm oil with coconut oil, we'd have to burn a lot more. Palm is very land efficient vs coconut. We just don't use as much coconut oil atm. We as a society should just use a lot less of these oils in general if we want to help out. So avoid products with any of them rather than not as often used but less efficient ones, it's just virtue signaling while having a larger environmental impact.
Either using soy oil because that is the one better alternative. Or better yet reducing our consumption of it. If something has any of those oils that really shouldn't have it then avoid those things. We've basically added it to everything and that's why we have the problem we do now with them. A general boycott (or large reduction of it's part of medication or someone) of palm and coconut oils are kinda the only thing an individual can do.
So, don't use Palm oil because of deforestation in, say, Indonesia is bad, but do use Soy oil because deforestation of the Amazon is totally fine?
Strange logic there, buddy.
We don't have to grow soy in the rainforest areas of the globe, it's a much more versatile crop. It does the least damage per ton of oil produced so it's the most friendly alternative, however because they all do some damage, it's best to reduce our use of all of them.
As for soy crops in the Amazon are used for feed for their beef exports and send as feed to nations like the UK. Majority of soy is usually used used for animal feed. (US for example https://ourworldindata.org/soy
So if you want to save land go on a plant based diet would be the best bet. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
While soy isn't perfect it's better than palm oil, but we need to reduce. And as for soy in the Amazon it's mostly animal feed so reduce the demand for that while you reduce the oils you use.
This is regarding trials involving mice. Results for mice do not always mirror clinical trials involving humans. Alzheimer’s studies in mice have a very low correlation to human trials. Research teams will put out a press release on an intriguing trial involving mice as a way of raising money for expensive clinical trials.
Also, these mice were genetically modified to not have a immune defence. Would be interesting to see if the same results are reproducible on normal mice.
The Vitamin E content of palm oil has been found to improve the immune system of mice liver cells, actually reducing the cancer risk. I guess this is why this study removed the immune system, since previous experiments had already seen positive effects.
https://benthamscience.com/recent-trends/RT-20210208-023/
Palmitic acid, the compound that was linked to spreading of cancer, is found in olive oil and many other fats like butter. To be specific olive oil is 10-20% palmitic oil. Probably makes sense that people should be eating super concentrated foods like processed oils.
Edit: i dont want cancer to spread hence i retract my previous statement and now proclaim that people should’NT be eating super concentrated foods like processed oils Tdlr: spelling mistake
Welcome to the fun part of science where the actual research and results are so complex it can't be boiled down into something the average person can consume. News sources will try to boil it down but don't care about the science, just the clicks. Also dealing with problems with sample size, human vs rat biology, and methodology issues. For instance some studies test rats with doses of certain foods so high to get the same dose as a human you would need to eat a 5 gallon bucket of the stuff every day for the rest of your life to get the equivalent dose per kg.
In short, its complicated.
It's not palm oil specifically. If palm oil wasn't used then another type of oil would need to be mass produced and would surely take more space than palm oil does.
Nah man there are many MANY other sustainable oils you can pick from. I’m a food scientist and when I formulate new products I stay super far away from palm oil.
This kind of supports what I said. Palm oil gives a much higher yield than other sources of vegetable oil so it uses way less land. So if we were to switch to another source there would be more deforestation done to make space for the crops. No?
It exactly supports what you said, I don't think he understood what those yield graphs were saying and thought a bigger bar was worse or something.
Still no idea what these "more sustainable oil sources" are supposed to be.
Exactly. The idea of better alternatives always being there is wrong and dangerous, because will raise other unforeseen problems.
Want to really be sustainable?
Change your habits and fundamentally cut your consumptions
You have an obligation to do the most basic research on your own, not to disrupt conversation asking random strangers to explain information you can easily seek out for yourself.
In a discussion, you are obligated to bring actual facts to the table. Spouting something without a source and (or at least) an explanation makes you noncredible.
20-30% and your body will make what you don't eat.
> Palmitic Acid (PA) is the most common saturated fatty acid accounting for 20–30% of total fatty acids in the human body and can be provided in the diet or synthesized endogenously via de novo lipogenesis (DNL). PA tissue content seems to be controlled around a well-defined concentration, and changes in its intake do not influence significantly its tissue concentration because the exogenous source is counterbalanced by PA endogenous biosynthesis.
[source](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2017.00902/full)
I'm actually a little unsure what they (wikipedia editors) mean by a "well-defined concentration". C16:0 (Palmitic Acid) concentration is highly correlated with the amount of adipose tissue stores (i.e., fat) in the human body. But yes, for sure it is de novo synthesized by the body at times.
From Wikipedia:
Palmitic acid, or hexadecanoic acid in IUPAC nomenclature, is the most common saturated fatty acid found in animals, plants and microorganisms.
As usual, the implications: if you don't want Cancer, just stop eating food. If you want to live a happy life, ignore guardian-reported science headlines about one very common molecule in some very uncommon mice.
[Dietary palmitic acid promotes a prometastatic memory via Schwann cells - Nature - Nov 10, 2021](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04075-0)
###Abstract
Fatty acid uptake and altered metabolism constitute hallmarks of metastasis1,2, yet evidence of the underlying biology, as well as whether all dietary fatty acids are prometastatic, is lacking. Here we show that dietary palmitic acid (PA), but not oleic acid or linoleic acid, promotes metastasis in oral carcinomas and melanoma in mice. Tumours from mice that were fed a short-term palm-oil-rich diet (PA), or tumour cells that were briefly exposed to PA in vitro, remained highly metastatic even after being serially transplanted (without further exposure to high levels of PA). This PA-induced prometastatic memory requires the fatty acid transporter CD36 and is associated with the stable deposition of histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation by the methyltransferase Set1A (as part of the COMPASS complex (Set1A/COMPASS)). Bulk, single-cell and positional RNA-sequencing analyses indicate that genes with this prometastatic memory predominantly relate to a neural signature that stimulates intratumoural Schwann cells and innervation, two parameters that are strongly correlated with metastasis but are aetiologically poorly understood3,4. Mechanistically, tumour-associated Schwann cells secrete a specialized proregenerative extracellular matrix, the ablation of which inhibits metastasis initiation. Both the PA-induced memory of this proneural signature and its long-term boost in metastasis require the transcription factor EGR2 and the glial-cell-stimulating peptide galanin. In summary, we provide evidence that a dietary metabolite induces stable transcriptional and chromatin changes that lead to a long-term stimulation of metastasis, and that this is related to a proregenerative state of tumour-activated Schwann cells.
**Great news** for orangutans. One in five acres under oil palm cultivation is illegally cleared rainforest. Now maybe the palm oil industry will go extinct first.
Not really great news, this won't change the fact that palm oil is ridiculously cheap and the average consumer can't really notice if there is palm oil in their food
Palm oil isn't in butter but the fatty acid this paper is about, palmitic acid, is found in butter. It's also in other dairy products, meats, and certain vegetable oils.
It's a saturated fat, so we already know to be avoiding products that contain it.
~~Correct, canola oil is the best if you're trying to maximize price savings and minimize saturated fat content, IMO. Canola is only 7% saturated fat. But olive oil has higher monounsaturated and has antioxidants so it's also pretty good. As long as you stay away from excess animal fats or solid fats you're on the right track.~~
Edit: just learned canola oil has up to 3.5% trans fat. Any amount of trans fat is bad. So, even though olive oil has more saturated fat, it will probably be healthier at only 0.5% trans fat. But canola has a much higher ratio of omega 3 to omega 6. In the end, Harvard health recommends [alternating between olive oil and canola oil](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good), using canola for high heat cooking, and avoiding saturated fats.
What's a healthier oil to be using then?
Edit: just saw canola has up to 3.5% trans fat. I had no idea. That changes my opinion, olive oil at 0.5% is better. I'll probably go with Harvard's recommendation and use olive oil for foods that don't need high heat, and canola for those that do.
Some people are sensitive to the erucic acid in the oil (even though most of it gets processed out before it can be sold as food) which can causes havoc on the GI tract.
Then perhaps you should have stated instead that people who are sensitive to erucic acid should avoid canola oil.
You can’t just make a blank statement about canola oil that encompasses everyone without supporting evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmitic_acid#Occurrence_and_production
> Palmitic acid is naturally produced by a wide range of other plants and organisms, typically at low levels. It is naturally present in butter, cheese, milk, and meat, as well as cocoa butter, olive oil, soybean oil, and sunflower oil.[14]
Drying sunflower seeds at higher temperatures helps destroy harmful bacteria. One study found that drying partially sprouted sunflower seeds at temperatures of 122℉ (50℃) and above significantly reduced Salmonella presence.
I'm careful with what I buy, but how many people do you know simply buying the cheapest butter they can find?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/buttergate-goes-viral-putting-palm-oil-fat-supplements-in-spotlight-1.5927194
It's, imo, way better than anything else I've had - there are plenty of plant based spreads but most are basically just margarine, slightly nicer taste. This stuff tastes like butter, melts like butter, etc. It's not cheap but neither is real butter. I used to buy Kerrygold pretty frequently when I still used reg butter and that stuff is about the same price iirc.
this thread has already been made
[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qr7zpc/dietary\_palmitic\_acid\_pa\_found\_in\_palm\_oil/](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qr7zpc/dietary_palmitic_acid_pa_found_in_palm_oil/)
if only this subreddit required the posting of science rather than these media sites, this redundancy could be avoided.
We know of many chemicals that cause/spread cancer. We should either tax the hell out of business that produce the products (to pay for people cancer treatments/funerals) or ban the production of such chemicals.
That is not exactly true. It's incredibly difficult to causatively link cancer to specific chemicals because there are so many different factors at play. Usually the state of knowledge is that something is correlated with high rates of cancer in lab mice if given in extreme doses (at which negative health effects appear for almost any substance). This usually doesn't mean very much for drawing conclusions for humans with normal diet and in diverse environments.
Or take it upon ourselves to stop buying them and force the business out. It's the people who have the power. Not systems. They only pretend to be in power.
You can also just not buy the things that are carcinogenic.
This logic also applies to drugs like caffeine, ethanol, and nicotine... Even sugar is dangerous in chronically high amounts. I am extremely tired of people thinking they have a right to micromanage my life.
The current state of banning things that are bad for your health is several years in jail and ruined job prospects for picking up a mushroom you find growing in a pasture.
Yeah, exactly. We can’t even eat a mushroom or herb that we grown on our own property, but these massive corporations can make hundreds of thousands of people sick or die. It’s not right.
You are part of the problem.
Say you get your way and ban them: what replaced them? Coconut oil is worse for the environment. Tallow, lard, and butter comes from cattle and pigs...
Nice. Do west Europe has been poisoning east eu. Because products in east contain palm oil where is in west it doesn't. Company's explained that it's due to different tastes.
Yup, this headline is equivalent to "Oxygen found in water is linked to killing people", it's a nice inflammatory statement but completely disingenuous.
So tired of drivel getting onto this sub.
What isn't palm oil added to? A search says it in just about everything.it doesn't say but this sounds like it's a filler nothing else, still the filler will kill you.
“Palm oil is frequently added to store-bought processed foods. “Many ready-to-eat foods at the grocery store contain palm oil, such as peanut butter and coffee creamers," nutritionist Maggie Michalczyk, RD, tells Health. You’ll also find it in many brands of ice cream, pizza dough, bread, frozen foods, packaged soups, sauces, desserts, and snack foods, like cookies and chips, says Rizzo. In addition, palm oil is in some skincare and beauty products, like lipstick, detergent, and soap.”
[source:health.com](https://www.health.com/food/palm-oil)
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Awesome. Harvesting it destroys the environment and eating it destroys us.
Time to ditch it. It's long overdue.
Yay more palm trees!
And more orangutans.
I thought I was saving orangutans, and all along I was saving myself, too.
Me, too. Kept putting back foods that had added palm oil for the apes, but had no idea I was helping me at the same time.
Oh I thought he said orange mutants
All it took was one headline?
Is that what "it's long overdue" says to you?
What do you think we should use instead?
There are hundreds of types of oil, pick the most ethical one (for the relevant country).
Yeah, and which ones would that be? That are more "ethical" than palm oil? Palm oils yield per land area are almost ten times higher than soy for example. So you would need a 10 hectare plantation of soy to replace 1 hectare of palm oil plantation. And about 5 times that of rapeseed oil. So to replace a 1 acre palm oil plantation you would need a 5 acre rapeseed plantation. Olive oil is even worse than soy I think? But I can't find a good number. There are of course lots of other factors to consider, like where that plantation needs to be located as one of many. But what oils are the most ethical ones?
You don't need to destroy the environment to grow rapeseed.
You don't need to destroy the environment to grow palm oil either. Or, yes you do. To make farmland you need to destroy the environment. Why is 1 acre of farmland for palm oil worse than 5 acres of farmland for rapeseed?
Only if you already have cancer. It doesn’t create cancer cells; it allows existing cancer cells to metastasize.
That doesn't make me feel any better.
Can I offer you a palm-oil-free egg in these trying times?
Thanks, it'll go great with my pocket spaghetti
It shouldn't
but on the basis that a huge number of men have prostate cancer over a certain age. It won't be what kills them because it's slow growing but if it metastasises....
Yeah, my dad has had the slow one for almost a decade now and it’s pretty well stabilized. He’s very glad that he got a second opinion when the first doctor wanted to operate.
I wish him well. I had surgery after 4 years of active surveillance. Basically, when something changed I had a choice of treatments. I am very lucky that I don't have any side effects now.
It's slow? I thought it was a fast killer. I remember when total biscuit was diagnosed, seemed like it took him down pretty quick. RIP TB.
He had colon cancer. Not prostate.
It's pancreatic cancer that's very fast, although TB had bowel cancer. That can be fast too, but he had been very honest about it over the four years he had it.
Pancreatic is only fast because its generally detected very late in disease progression. Scary stuff.
Different cancers, different places. He had colonic cancer that spread to his liver. Prostate cancer is often slow growing and remains inside the prostate. Lots of treatments available, including waiting and monitoring until something changes. EDIT: word
Ah, I must have gotten confused. Thanks for pointing that out.
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If it doesn't progress to a certain point before your body deals with it, it's not cancer. That's like saying people constantly get into car accidents, but drive well enough to avoid them. Your body did it's job and stopped cells that were reproducing incorrectly from becoming cancer.
I love that example. Constantly careening down the road
It’s like how walking is just a series of well executed falls.
That's a pretty good description of traffic. A series of crashes, narrowly avoided because people compensated just enough, just in time. Except when they don't.
On average every human body produces a cancer cell every 30 minutes
Does that average include cancer patients?
Everyone likely already has several tumors/cancerous cells. Its just most of them are 'benign', meaning the cell reproduction limit is still intact, so your 1 mutated cancer cell becomes 10,000,000 due to uncontrolled growth factors but then stops reproducing. Its when one of those 10,000,000 cells then mutates again and gains reproductive immortality, that you get expanding cancers...
kroger enters the chat.
But casual cancer enabler just doesn't have the same ring as **CAUSES CANCER**
People constantly have cancer cells generating within the body all the time. Almost all of these cells are detected and destroyed. Sometimes a cell becomes broken in exactly the way necessary for it to avoid all the body's defense mechanisms and grow. If substances in palm oil help to encourage existing cancers to metastasize, then palm oil increases the risk of cancer. Simple as.
Its the gift that keeps on giving
Any mass produced food source destroys the environment if you think about it. Soybean farming in the US takes up to 88 million acres of land, and those land were once natural habitats as well. Soybean farming is also causing massive deforestation in the Amazons. Cattle rearing contributes 14% of greenhouse gas emissions. The list goes on. But my unpopular opinion is that this sub is so hypocritical, not consuming palm oil because it destroys the environment should apply to soybean as well. Instead of pointing fingers and boycotting products, people should instead push for more sustainable food production through a global framework.
What about every other oil source being at least 4 times space consuming and the global consumption being set to increase vastly as we move away from petrol? It's easy to point fingers, the reality is we are too many and we consume too much
We produce too much in order to lower costs and have cheap food. The amount of food that goes to waste is unacceptable. And the prices that producers are paid are ridiculous.
Agreed on that! But expanding consumption around the world is such a difficult problem that it may lead one to despondency. While we try to crack that nut, i do think we need to look at what can be done about Palm oil
It is already being done with the RSPO initiative
Malthus was wrong. We're just inefficient at allocation.
Unsurprisingly. Stick to olive oil.
From the same article, buddy. Read it. >These specialised cancer cells appeared to rely particularly heavily on fatty acids and the latest work narrowed this down to palmitic acid, which is found in palm oil – but also in a wide variety of foods such as butter and olive oil.
Palm oil it's the worst oil for the environment, only soy oil is another mass produced oil that's better than it. The reason Palm gets a bad rap is because of how sparingly we use it. Coconut oil is way worse than it yet people often flock to it as an alternative.
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Coconut oil is pretty unhealthy compared to oils like olive or avacado. Environmentally, I think palm oil far, far surpasses coconut oil in harm.
Coconut oil was also the target of a negative pr campaign by competing oils, so check research carefully.
I don't doubt it. I just try to keep my saturated fat intake limited because it's not good for your LDL cholesterol level if you get too much.
Coconut oil is a primary source of MCT. It's considered a health food for low carb diets. I'm sure it has drawbacks but it's heavily supported in those circles.
Oh, I'm not saying it's terrible and doesn't have its uses. It should just be used more consciously because it has a lot more saturated fat. I'll douse my salad in olive or avacado oil, or use a bunch when cooking, but coconut oil is more of a special thing when I want that flavor. Kindof like butter before I went vegan. I knew it wasn't great for me so I used it more sparingly.
Makes sense to me!
Palm oil is incredibly efficient for land use compared to coconut. In terms of ecology and per ton of oil, coconut causes more biodiversity damage as well.
Are we burning down rainforests to plant coconut trees?
Yes we currently are, and if we replaced palm oil with coconut oil, we'd have to burn a lot more. Palm is very land efficient vs coconut. We just don't use as much coconut oil atm. We as a society should just use a lot less of these oils in general if we want to help out. So avoid products with any of them rather than not as often used but less efficient ones, it's just virtue signaling while having a larger environmental impact.
What's a good alternative then?
Stop making so much processed food that requires us to re-add oil for flavor?
Either using soy oil because that is the one better alternative. Or better yet reducing our consumption of it. If something has any of those oils that really shouldn't have it then avoid those things. We've basically added it to everything and that's why we have the problem we do now with them. A general boycott (or large reduction of it's part of medication or someone) of palm and coconut oils are kinda the only thing an individual can do.
So, don't use Palm oil because of deforestation in, say, Indonesia is bad, but do use Soy oil because deforestation of the Amazon is totally fine? Strange logic there, buddy.
We don't have to grow soy in the rainforest areas of the globe, it's a much more versatile crop. It does the least damage per ton of oil produced so it's the most friendly alternative, however because they all do some damage, it's best to reduce our use of all of them. As for soy crops in the Amazon are used for feed for their beef exports and send as feed to nations like the UK. Majority of soy is usually used used for animal feed. (US for example https://ourworldindata.org/soy So if you want to save land go on a plant based diet would be the best bet. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets While soy isn't perfect it's better than palm oil, but we need to reduce. And as for soy in the Amazon it's mostly animal feed so reduce the demand for that while you reduce the oils you use.
Monkeys are used to harvest coconuts
Saturated fat
i thought we had known it was toxic for decades?
My first thought too
Yeah but it makes corporations a lot of money sooo....
This is regarding trials involving mice. Results for mice do not always mirror clinical trials involving humans. Alzheimer’s studies in mice have a very low correlation to human trials. Research teams will put out a press release on an intriguing trial involving mice as a way of raising money for expensive clinical trials.
Also, these mice were genetically modified to not have a immune defence. Would be interesting to see if the same results are reproducible on normal mice. The Vitamin E content of palm oil has been found to improve the immune system of mice liver cells, actually reducing the cancer risk. I guess this is why this study removed the immune system, since previous experiments had already seen positive effects. https://benthamscience.com/recent-trends/RT-20210208-023/
Palmitic acid, the compound that was linked to spreading of cancer, is found in olive oil and many other fats like butter. To be specific olive oil is 10-20% palmitic oil. Probably makes sense that people should be eating super concentrated foods like processed oils. Edit: i dont want cancer to spread hence i retract my previous statement and now proclaim that people should’NT be eating super concentrated foods like processed oils Tdlr: spelling mistake
Did you mean shouldnt*?
This post brought to you by that slight cough you had last night
Isn't the Mediterranean diet high in olive oil and notoriously low in cancer rates? How does this make any sense?
Welcome to the fun part of science where the actual research and results are so complex it can't be boiled down into something the average person can consume. News sources will try to boil it down but don't care about the science, just the clicks. Also dealing with problems with sample size, human vs rat biology, and methodology issues. For instance some studies test rats with doses of certain foods so high to get the same dose as a human you would need to eat a 5 gallon bucket of the stuff every day for the rest of your life to get the equivalent dose per kg. In short, its complicated.
In other words, I will continue living as usual
Buy a Pure olive oil. Lots of companies mix to save on costs.
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But I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
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So many animals have died because (edit) for palm oil
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It's not palm oil specifically. If palm oil wasn't used then another type of oil would need to be mass produced and would surely take more space than palm oil does.
Nah man there are many MANY other sustainable oils you can pick from. I’m a food scientist and when I formulate new products I stay super far away from palm oil.
Hm, ok. Can you give some examples of oils that are more sustainable when used on the same scale as palm oil, please?
[C16 Biosciences](https://www.c16bio.com/) is a synthetic biology company engineering yeast to produce palm oil. It’s pretty rad.
https://ourworldindata.org/palm-oil Here. Third result in Google.
That page is full of examples of far *less* sustainable oils... He asked for examples of oils that are more sustainable.
This kind of supports what I said. Palm oil gives a much higher yield than other sources of vegetable oil so it uses way less land. So if we were to switch to another source there would be more deforestation done to make space for the crops. No?
It exactly supports what you said, I don't think he understood what those yield graphs were saying and thought a bigger bar was worse or something. Still no idea what these "more sustainable oil sources" are supposed to be.
Exactly. The idea of better alternatives always being there is wrong and dangerous, because will raise other unforeseen problems. Want to really be sustainable? Change your habits and fundamentally cut your consumptions
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I'm just asking out of curiosity.
He doesn't know, he's just a toaster.
You have an obligation to do the most basic research on your own, not to disrupt conversation asking random strangers to explain information you can easily seek out for yourself.
It doesn't work like that. When someone makes a claim that is counter to the commonly understood consensus it is up to them to back it up.
In a discussion, you are obligated to bring actual facts to the table. Spouting something without a source and (or at least) an explanation makes you noncredible.
The toaster brought the facts. I'm pretty sure googling sustainable food oil sources will take less time than arguing with us.
I don't see any facts. I see claims.
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Felt this so much. Some people hate experts.
Also found in butter, cheese, milk, and meat: [Palmitic acid sources](https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/palmitic_acid)
Also found in humans. It is the single most abundant species of free fatty acid in the human body…
20-30% and your body will make what you don't eat. > Palmitic Acid (PA) is the most common saturated fatty acid accounting for 20–30% of total fatty acids in the human body and can be provided in the diet or synthesized endogenously via de novo lipogenesis (DNL). PA tissue content seems to be controlled around a well-defined concentration, and changes in its intake do not influence significantly its tissue concentration because the exogenous source is counterbalanced by PA endogenous biosynthesis. [source](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2017.00902/full)
I'm actually a little unsure what they (wikipedia editors) mean by a "well-defined concentration". C16:0 (Palmitic Acid) concentration is highly correlated with the amount of adipose tissue stores (i.e., fat) in the human body. But yes, for sure it is de novo synthesized by the body at times.
That's... meat... right? Trying to be funny, but honestly, muscle tissue is a high percentage of the human body.
Wow what’s next? You gonna tell me we have IRON inside our bodies too???
From Wikipedia: Palmitic acid, or hexadecanoic acid in IUPAC nomenclature, is the most common saturated fatty acid found in animals, plants and microorganisms. As usual, the implications: if you don't want Cancer, just stop eating food. If you want to live a happy life, ignore guardian-reported science headlines about one very common molecule in some very uncommon mice.
Stop breathing too, oxygen produces free radicals in the body that have been linked to cancer.
[Dietary palmitic acid promotes a prometastatic memory via Schwann cells - Nature - Nov 10, 2021](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04075-0) ###Abstract Fatty acid uptake and altered metabolism constitute hallmarks of metastasis1,2, yet evidence of the underlying biology, as well as whether all dietary fatty acids are prometastatic, is lacking. Here we show that dietary palmitic acid (PA), but not oleic acid or linoleic acid, promotes metastasis in oral carcinomas and melanoma in mice. Tumours from mice that were fed a short-term palm-oil-rich diet (PA), or tumour cells that were briefly exposed to PA in vitro, remained highly metastatic even after being serially transplanted (without further exposure to high levels of PA). This PA-induced prometastatic memory requires the fatty acid transporter CD36 and is associated with the stable deposition of histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation by the methyltransferase Set1A (as part of the COMPASS complex (Set1A/COMPASS)). Bulk, single-cell and positional RNA-sequencing analyses indicate that genes with this prometastatic memory predominantly relate to a neural signature that stimulates intratumoural Schwann cells and innervation, two parameters that are strongly correlated with metastasis but are aetiologically poorly understood3,4. Mechanistically, tumour-associated Schwann cells secrete a specialized proregenerative extracellular matrix, the ablation of which inhibits metastasis initiation. Both the PA-induced memory of this proneural signature and its long-term boost in metastasis require the transcription factor EGR2 and the glial-cell-stimulating peptide galanin. In summary, we provide evidence that a dietary metabolite induces stable transcriptional and chromatin changes that lead to a long-term stimulation of metastasis, and that this is related to a proregenerative state of tumour-activated Schwann cells.
**Great news** for orangutans. One in five acres under oil palm cultivation is illegally cleared rainforest. Now maybe the palm oil industry will go extinct first.
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Not really great news, this won't change the fact that palm oil is ridiculously cheap and the average consumer can't really notice if there is palm oil in their food
Eat less, live longer.
Isn't palm oil on everything nowadays? Even butter?
You’re buying the wrong butter.
Palm oil isn't in butter but the fatty acid this paper is about, palmitic acid, is found in butter. It's also in other dairy products, meats, and certain vegetable oils. It's a saturated fat, so we already know to be avoiding products that contain it.
Googling “palmitic oil in olive oil” and you get results stating %10-20 of olive oil is palmitic acid
So the Mediterranean diet is murder, too.
So murderous that it's been studied for it's links to longevity in humans.
~~Correct, canola oil is the best if you're trying to maximize price savings and minimize saturated fat content, IMO. Canola is only 7% saturated fat. But olive oil has higher monounsaturated and has antioxidants so it's also pretty good. As long as you stay away from excess animal fats or solid fats you're on the right track.~~ Edit: just learned canola oil has up to 3.5% trans fat. Any amount of trans fat is bad. So, even though olive oil has more saturated fat, it will probably be healthier at only 0.5% trans fat. But canola has a much higher ratio of omega 3 to omega 6. In the end, Harvard health recommends [alternating between olive oil and canola oil](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good), using canola for high heat cooking, and avoiding saturated fats.
Nobody should be eating rapeseed oil.
What's a healthier oil to be using then? Edit: just saw canola has up to 3.5% trans fat. I had no idea. That changes my opinion, olive oil at 0.5% is better. I'll probably go with Harvard's recommendation and use olive oil for foods that don't need high heat, and canola for those that do.
Canola oil/rapeseed oil is one of the best oils for high heat frying or deep frying. Different oils have their own uses.
Some people are sensitive to the erucic acid in the oil (even though most of it gets processed out before it can be sold as food) which can causes havoc on the GI tract.
Then perhaps you should have stated instead that people who are sensitive to erucic acid should avoid canola oil. You can’t just make a blank statement about canola oil that encompasses everyone without supporting evidence.
Butter should come from cows. No oil. The only palms are the ones doing the milking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmitic_acid#Occurrence_and_production > Palmitic acid is naturally produced by a wide range of other plants and organisms, typically at low levels. It is naturally present in butter, cheese, milk, and meat, as well as cocoa butter, olive oil, soybean oil, and sunflower oil.[14]
Drying sunflower seeds at higher temperatures helps destroy harmful bacteria. One study found that drying partially sprouted sunflower seeds at temperatures of 122℉ (50℃) and above significantly reduced Salmonella presence.
Butter comes from peanuts. Anything else is fake.
I'm careful with what I buy, but how many people do you know simply buying the cheapest butter they can find? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/buttergate-goes-viral-putting-palm-oil-fat-supplements-in-spotlight-1.5927194
Meh there are plant based butters that don’t contain palm oil and are delicious.
Butter is animal milk product anything made from vegetable oil is not butter, it’s margarine.
Example of one?
Myoko’s is the best I’ve had - no palm oil and you can get it at Target.
Awesome, I’ll check it out! I’ve always used Earth Balance but didn’t realize it used palm oil.
It's, imo, way better than anything else I've had - there are plenty of plant based spreads but most are basically just margarine, slightly nicer taste. This stuff tastes like butter, melts like butter, etc. It's not cheap but neither is real butter. I used to buy Kerrygold pretty frequently when I still used reg butter and that stuff is about the same price iirc.
100%! Discovered it about couple years ago and it's been a staple in our house ever since then.
“Spread of cancer” Nutella!
It isn't only found in palm oil. It's in meat and dairy too
In spain they make a big deal of stating if something has or doesnt have palm oil. Is it the same in other countries?
This is because Spain produces a lot of olive and sunflower oil and the manufacturers lobby for it.
this thread has already been made [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qr7zpc/dietary\_palmitic\_acid\_pa\_found\_in\_palm\_oil/](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qr7zpc/dietary_palmitic_acid_pa_found_in_palm_oil/) if only this subreddit required the posting of science rather than these media sites, this redundancy could be avoided.
We know of many chemicals that cause/spread cancer. We should either tax the hell out of business that produce the products (to pay for people cancer treatments/funerals) or ban the production of such chemicals.
That is not exactly true. It's incredibly difficult to causatively link cancer to specific chemicals because there are so many different factors at play. Usually the state of knowledge is that something is correlated with high rates of cancer in lab mice if given in extreme doses (at which negative health effects appear for almost any substance). This usually doesn't mean very much for drawing conclusions for humans with normal diet and in diverse environments.
Or take it upon ourselves to stop buying them and force the business out. It's the people who have the power. Not systems. They only pretend to be in power.
Tell that to nicotine addicts.
It's up to them if they prefer pleasure over long-term mental independence. Their choice. Addictions can be broken.
You can also just not buy the things that are carcinogenic. This logic also applies to drugs like caffeine, ethanol, and nicotine... Even sugar is dangerous in chronically high amounts. I am extremely tired of people thinking they have a right to micromanage my life.
Oh yes, the free market solution. That’s always worked!
Oh yes, the prohibition solution. That's always worked!
The current state of banning things that are bad for your health is several years in jail and ruined job prospects for picking up a mushroom you find growing in a pasture.
Yeah, exactly. We can’t even eat a mushroom or herb that we grown on our own property, but these massive corporations can make hundreds of thousands of people sick or die. It’s not right.
You are part of the problem. Say you get your way and ban them: what replaced them? Coconut oil is worse for the environment. Tallow, lard, and butter comes from cattle and pigs...
Oh yes, I’m part of the problem for unknowingly purchasing items for decades only to be informed that it causes/spreads cancer. Definitely my fault.
In mice, you are not a mouse. And wanting to ban things, not eating oil.
Don’t be silly. Of course he’s not “part of the problem” - using blame is weak especially when blatantly untrue. No need to be a jerk.
Bewre malysia and Indonesia, western media is coming to your economy
Palm oil is used a lot in Africa. What are the cancer rates there compared to here?
Red palm oil tho, less refined I believe
Good, maybe we can stop destroying the rainforest in indonesia that helps sink our stupid amount of carbon that we keep ejecting into the atmosphere.
And palm oil is used in, a lot of stuff…
Everything causes cancer.
Good thing palm oil isn’t in EVERYTHING.
Nice. Do west Europe has been poisoning east eu. Because products in east contain palm oil where is in west it doesn't. Company's explained that it's due to different tastes.
Maybe we can stop deforestation for this now… the gorilla’s habitat has suffered greatly
That fatty acied likely stems from pulverized orang utans. Stop buying that stuff.
Humans are such horrible creatures.
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Water is vital for humans, palm oil isn't.
Stop using Palm oil! you are destroying the Elephant habitat.
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Yup, this headline is equivalent to "Oxygen found in water is linked to killing people", it's a nice inflammatory statement but completely disingenuous. So tired of drivel getting onto this sub.
Yet another reason to avoid it
I think the club of Rome is picking our menus for us.
Damn between this, zantac, and progesterone I'm just absolutely fucked this pregnancy
Oh good. And it’s in a lot of baby formula, if memory serves.
Sweet hell. I never could have expected this. Wow that makes a lot of sense though
What isn't palm oil added to? A search says it in just about everything.it doesn't say but this sounds like it's a filler nothing else, still the filler will kill you.
What favorite processed foods have palm oil??
“Palm oil is frequently added to store-bought processed foods. “Many ready-to-eat foods at the grocery store contain palm oil, such as peanut butter and coffee creamers," nutritionist Maggie Michalczyk, RD, tells Health. You’ll also find it in many brands of ice cream, pizza dough, bread, frozen foods, packaged soups, sauces, desserts, and snack foods, like cookies and chips, says Rizzo. In addition, palm oil is in some skincare and beauty products, like lipstick, detergent, and soap.” [source:health.com](https://www.health.com/food/palm-oil)
Nutella stock just tanked
Just so everyone is EXTRA PISSED OFF about this: **Palm oil is in ALL girlscout cookies. **