Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpush | Hacker News Reader

What effect are you talking about? And what does the production process for vegetable oils have to do with anything? This article is about palmitic acid which apart from obviously palm oil, is most abundant in animal fats like butter (~30%), tallow (26%) etc. since its a saturated fatty acid.

Most vegetable oils like canola and soybean have much less palmitic acid.

View on HN

Palm oil is a vegetable oil. The production of vegetable oil (read: palm oil) creates an end product that looks and feels like oil, but has all kinds of other bad shit in it. It gets refined, heated, bleached, heated, deoderized, etc...

The same thing happens to flour. We process the living shit out of it, then bleach it, then we have to add-in all the stuff we removed so that it still has some semblance of nutrition.

It's like the deep fried pickle. A pickle in and of itself is a pickle, but when you deep fry it, is it still a pickle? Some will argue yes. Does it still have the same general health characteristics, or more importantly, the lack of negative characteristics as the deep-fried one? No.

Palm oil isn't really in the same category as the vegetable oils that have had concern raised about them recently. It's not from a seed, so doesn't need a highly involved process to get meaningful amounts of it. Cold pressed palm oil has been in use for thousands of years. It's more like olive oil in this regard. (Of course, you can still refine it, and it often is refined. But it's not as easily oxidized as oils with a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids, so less concerning in that regard.)

The palmitic acid content of palm oil (or anything else) has nothing to do with what you're describing here. Like, absolutely nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com