Palm oil is trans fat free so woo!
However some studies show that if it is heated and cooled too many times it becomes unhealthy for us.
That leaves the question: how do we know how many times it has been heated and cooled before it ends up in our food (specifically peanut butter)?
I stay away from Palm oil only because I know very little about it.
Then again any fat/ oil, if heated and cooled repeatedly, will eventually breakdown.
I’ve always heard that palm oil is one of the cheapest oils, and - right or wrong - that didn’t make me want to ingest it.
The “partially hydrogenated” thing sounds bad to me, too. In looking through various article and studies, I think it’s a mixed picture, and perhaps palm oil isn’t really as bad as I used to think. Still, why not use olive oil, for example?
This is related to my peanut butter addiction. It just didn’t get addressed in that thread at all.
Palm oil is the only other peanut butter choice besides partially hydrogenated oil but it doesn’t sound all that healthy either unless it is heated only once or not at all, a guarantee of which I doubt I could get from any peanut butter makers.
@Fry, I did not know that palm oil was not partially hydrogenated. Have to say that’s a plus. There sure is a lot of it used these days!
What I see in reading about it is that fresh palm oil really looks okay - my opinion. There is a lot of stuff about it being “bad because it’s like saturated fats, i.e. butter, lard, etc.” No big deal, my opinion again, and most of the keto community isn’t worried about saturated fat.
When it’s processed, it gets oxidized, and that makes it more toxic, with potential problems for some of our organs. Read that here:
That makes gut-basic sense to me, that big agribusiness companies or food producers process the oil to make it more suitable for certain uses, or otherwise to alter its characteristics, all with an eye to the bottom line. That you “don’t get something for nothing” - again, just my gut feeling - would apply here, i.e. the oil is being changed “for the better” in the eyes of the sellers. If there is a corresponding “worse” for us users, as far as health, then no surprise to me that it’s not as good for us as the fresh oil is.
Hi Fry,
I recently purchased Kirkland Peanut Butter from Costco, and it doesn’t appear to have palm oil or partially hydrogenated oil. According to the packaging, the only ingredients are Dry Roasted Valencia Peanuts, Sea Salts.
Basically, every hydrogenated oil is horrible for your body. With the exception of extra virgin olive oil and aleolic safflower seed oil, stay away from polysaturated fats as best as you can. Those are the ones that are potentially hydrognated and inflammation-inducing.
Thanks. Perhaps I will just avoid oils in general and eat whole foods. I will miss my peanut butter. It has been a wonderful way to fill in protein, fat, potassium and so on over the years. Oh well.
Thank you. I really do not like the pure peanut only peanut butter. It is like eating a handful of dry roasted peanuts to me. Not particularly bad but regular peanut butter is like an amazing dessert to me.
Try making your own and when you grind it blend in some coconut oil. See if that works for you.
I just took a bite of Justin’s PB with palm oil. Gag. Tastes like oil. Peanut butter that’s is 
ground peanuts is best. I grind it myself at Whole Foods.
If you are only talking about what’s been added to processed foods, then of course it’s difficult to tell. For those purposes, I would imagine the palm oil would have been heavily processed and refined to take away the flavor. So it would be subject to more oxidation.
If you’re talking about using unrefined and unprocessed red palm oil in your cooking, then it is pretty well stable as it is half saturated fat. The flavor is acquired though, imo.
Production of traditional palm oil is HORRIBLE for the environment and is the leading cause of orangutan deaths. I refuse to support that industry. I do use red unrefined Palm oil that is habitat-friendly. It is good for frying and is anti-inflammatory. Would taste terrible in peanut butter though.
I would think after three times of reheating it, it is going to start becoming rancid and oxidized and losing electrons (even less so than polyunsaturated fats when heat is administered) and I would not want that floating around in my physiochemistry especially if it has been sitting on a shelf too-long?
