What's unhealthy about palm oil?

If you grew up anywhere in West or Central Africa, palm oil was not a health controversy. It was simply an ingredient in meals. That deep red oil went into stews, soups and sauces, it stained the rice a warm orange, and nobody thought of it as anything other than food.

So the first time I heard "palm oil is unhealthy" stated as a flat fact, it did not sit right, because the palm oil in that sentence and the palm oil in my homemade meals didn’t seem to be the same thing.
It turns out they often aren't. "Palm oil is unhealthy" is one of those claims that sounds simple but it folds three separate things into one.

There is the unrefined red palm oil that many use in preparation of meals. There is the industrially refined palm oil hidden in packaged foods. And there is the environmental side of how oil palm is grown in certain countries.

The three different sides of palm oil mistaken for one

Before any of the health question about palm oil makes meaning, the products have to be separated.

1. Unrefined red palm oil

Unrefined red palm oil is pressed from the fruit of the oil palm. Its deep red-orange colour is the natural pigment of the fruit. This is the oil traditional to African and some South American and Southeast Asian cooking.

2. Refined palm oil

Refined palm oil is the same fruit oil put through industrial refining, bleaching and deodorising. The process makes it pale and neutral. It’s used in many industrially made products such as margarine, biscuits, instant noodles, spreads and more.

3. Oil palm as a crop
The oil palm crop is an agricultural commodity grown at different scales in different geographic regions including Africa and Southeast Asia. At enormous scales, mostly in Southeast Asia, it has significant environmental impact mostly, deforestation.

Nutrition facts of palm oil

Palm oil is fat and so like every oil, it is calorie-dense and carries no carbohydrate or protein. Here is roughly what one tablespoon (about 14 grams) contains:

• Calories: about 120
• Total fat: about 14 g
• Saturated fat: about 7 g
• Monounsaturated fat: about 5 g
• Polyunsaturated fat: about 1.5 g
• Carbohydrate and protein: 0 g
• Cholesterol: 0 mg
• Vitamin E: about 2 mg in refined palm oil, roughly 14% of a day's worth

Across the whole fat, the split is close to 50% saturated (mostly palmitic acid), 40% monounsaturated (the oleic acid also found in olive oil), and 10% polyunsaturated. That roughly half-saturated profile is the major fact that drives most of the health conversation about palm oil.

Unrefined red palm oil has provitamin A carotenoids and a much larger dose of vitamin E, most of it as tocotrienols. Refining removes most of these important nutrients and this is a major nutritional gap between the deep red oil and the pale industrial one.

Benefits of red palm oil

Red palm oil is one of the richest natural plant sources of carotenoids, the pigments your body converts into vitamin A. It carries roughly 500 parts per million of carotenes, mostly alpha- and beta-carotene (Nagendran et al., Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 2000). It is also unusually rich in vitamin E. Around 70% of its vitamin E is in the form of tocotrienols, a variant that is largely absent in most cooking and that has drawn research interest for its antioxidant behaviour (Red Palm Oil: A Review on Processing and Health Benefits, Journal of Oleo Science, 2021).

A study in Burkina Faso that added a small amount of red palm oil to school meals a few times a week over a school year improved children's vitamin A status (Zeba et al., Nutrition Journal, 2006). A broader review of animal and human studies reached a similar conclusion, describing red palm oil as a useful source of provitamin A and vitamin E with measurable effects on nutritional status (Loganathan et al., Nutrition Reviews, 2017).
Some types of red palm oil, depending on the preparation method have very desirable aroma and taste, some very delicious varieties even serve as dips for roasted foods. In simple terms, palm oil, the red unrefined type, is not a health risk to be managed. It is a nutrient-rich ingredient that is used as part of nutritious diets in many cultures.

The palm oil controversy and where the "unhealthy" reputation comes from

Most of the palm oil people eat is not the red oil. Instead , it’s the refined pale yellow version.

To make palm oil pale and neutral for industrial use, it is refined, bleached and deodorized. This removes the carotenoids, which is why the red colour disappears, and much of the vitamin E too. What is left is a stable, flavourless fat that is good for manufacturing other products. And this is the palm oil on the labels of many processed products.

There is an another issue that specifically affects refined oils. When vegetable oils are refined at high temperatures, around 200 degrees Celsius, they can form process contaminants called 3-MCPD esters and glycidyl esters. Refined palm oil tends to carry some of the highest levels of these among common oils and the European Food Safety Authority has flagged them as a health concern, with glycidol considered genotoxic and 3-MCPD linked to kidney effects in animal studies (EFSA, Process Contaminants in Vegetable Oils, 2016). It’s exposure are exposure and dose-dependent. Since that assessment, refiners have adjusted their processes and cut these contaminant levels substantially

Additionally, refined palm oil is a workhorse of many ultra-processed foods. It’s found in biscuits, chocolate spreads, instant noodles, margarines and so much more. When those foods are linked to poor health, the palm oil in them takes some of the blame, even though the wider problem is the whole ultra-processed package, not that ingredient alone.

Palm oil and health: the saturated fat

About half of palm oil's fat is saturated, mostly palmitic acid. This saturated fat content has affected experts’ stance on the oil in nutrition debates over the decades. The evidence is fairly consistent: when palm oil replaces oils low in saturated fat, like sunflower or canola, LDL cholesterol tends to rise (Palm Oil and LDL Cholesterol, Journal of Nutrition, 2015). LDL is one of the better-established markers of cardiovascular risk.

However , palm oil also tends to raise HDL cholesterol somewhat, and an umbrella review of the evidence pointed out that most studies measure cholesterol markers rather than actual heart-disease outcomes, so the direct link from palm oil to cardiovascular events is less settled than the LDL levels alone suggests (Unhapipatpong et al., umbrella review, 2021). What the evidence does not support is either extreme. In essence, palm oil is neither the cure or the solution to heart problems. It is a fat high in saturates, and best understood the way you would understand butter or coconut oil.

The deforestation related to oil palm production

The environmental critique of palm oil is the part that is often most true and most misapplied, because it gets used as if it were a statement about nutrition.

Oil palm is a remarkably productive crop, yielding far more oil per hectare than most alternatives. But its commercial expansion, concentrated overwhelmingly in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for the great majority of global production, has driven significant clearing of tropical forest and the loss of habitat that goes with it (Our World in Data, Palm Oil). That is a serious food-systems problem, and it is fair to weigh it when you think about the global palm industry.

That said, it is very different from what the oil does in your body. A spoon of red palm oil from a smallholder in Ghana and a spoon of refined palm oil from a plantation carved out of cleared rainforest can be nutritionally different and even environmentally different. But the environmental aspect is about how and where the crop was grown, not about whether the it is nourishing. Conflating the two leads to odd conclusions, like treating a traditional staple as unhealthy because of land-use decisions made on another continent. The environmental concern deserves serious attention on its own terms, and the reason why it should not be smuggled into the nutrition aspect.

Reconsider palm oil this way

When palm oil shows up unnamed in a long ingredient list on a packaged snack, it is mostly the refined kind.

When you are looking at a bottle of deep red oil in a market or cooking a traditional dish that calls for it, you are dealing with the nutrient-rich oil.

The saturated-fat consideration applies to both, and this is a reason to choose variety across the oils you use.
The environmental aspect is best answered by looking at sourcing and certification, especially for the refined kind of palm oil.

Palm oil is not unhealthy

The red palm oil in a Ghanaian kitchen, the neutral pale yellow palm oil inside a packaged biscuit and the oil palm plantation on cleared forest land are not one thing. They’re a nutrient-rich food ingredient worth using in dishes, an industrial ingredient worth reading labels for and an environmental issue worth taking seriously on its own respectively.