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The Skinny on Palm Oil |
| An interview with Mohd Salleh Kassim with the American Palm Oil Council |
03.08.2013
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NH: What is palm oil?
MSK: Palm oil is obtained from the flesh or mesocarp of the oil palm fruit. Like olive oil, palm oil is fruit oil. Palm oil should not be mistaken for palm kernel oil which is extracted from the kernel or seed of the palm fruit.
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Therefore, the oil palm fruit is unique. From the fruit two distinct types of oils are produced: palm oil and palm kernel oil. Both are edible oils but with very different chemical composition, physical properties and applications. Each palm fruit produces about 90 percent palm oil and 10 percent palm kernel oil.
Palm oil has a balanced composition of both saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Coupled with nature's gift of high vitamin E content, the oil is naturally very stable.
Palm oil contains an equal proportion of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. It's particularly rich in the saturated palmitic acid (44 percent), with substantial amounts of the monounsaturated oleic acid (40 percent), and smaller amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids (10 percent).
Palm oil has had a history of food use for more than 5,000 years in more than 130 countries worldwide.
NH: What food products contain palm oil?
MSK: Palm oil's semi-solid properties make it a favorite ingredient among the food processors. From palm oil you can have unlimited oil fractions for use of any kind of food applications. The oil could to be incorporated into a wide variety of food products which include cooking oils, margarines, noodles, shortenings, vegetable ghee, bakery products, chocolates, hot beverages, coffee creamers, and ice cream.
Due to its excellent stability it is the No. 1 choice in the world as frying oil for foods such as instant noodles, French fries, potato crisps, doughnuts and fried meats and snacks.
The natural solid nature of palm stearin make it most ideal for formulating solid fats such as vanaspati, margarine, shortenings and other bakery fats. More importantly, these palm fats are not hydrogenated and therefore are trans-fatty acids free.
NH: Is palm oil a trans fat? Will palm oil consumption raise my blood cholesterol level?
MSK: No. Palm oil's natural semi-solid properties and the versatility of blending with its solid fraction, palm stearin, makes hydrogenation of palm oil unnecessary. Therefore, food products containing palm oil as the sole or main fat ingredient are essentially trans-free.
A re-examination of the data of some early published western studies that included palm oil showed that when palm oil replaced the habitual fats of Western diets, blood cholesterol levels in the subjects did not go up but instead were reduced from 7 percent to 38 percent.
NH: What's so special about red palm oil?
MSK: Red palm oil (RPO) is the only commercially-available oil that contains substantial amounts of the natural plant pigments called "carotenoids" (about 550 ug/g), as well as vitamin E (600 ug/g) comprising both tocotrienols (65 percent) and alpha-tocopherol (35 percent).
Some of the carotenoids in RPO are converted to vitamin A in our body; the the rest of the carotenoids, together with vitamin E (particularly tocotrienols), are reported to play a vital role in advanced nutrition- boosting the immune system, scavenging damaging reactive oxygen species in our body, and are involved in complex mechanisms which have evolved to protect the body from chronic diseases such heart disease and cancers of the breast and skin. For more information, visit www.americanpalmoilcouncil.com.
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