Asian elephant, Denver zoo. Photo by A. Hansen, Wikimedia Commons
(Click on the following link to listen to an audio version of this blog ….. Palm_Oil
Last summer we were all at the Denver Zoo standing in a concession line trying to decide between cotton candy and popcorn (thank goodness, the popcorn won!). While we were in line waiting to fork out $5 for about 25 cents of popcorn (hey, the profits go to support the zoo animals!) we heard the amplified voice of the elephant keeper starting up his elephant demonstration.
The keeper had two of the zoo’s Asian elephants posed in a concrete enclosure surrounded by tiers of bench seats for tired, zoo-wandering humans. We (three generations of Hamilton-Sillman’s) sat and enjoyed the presentation very much. The elephants were willing and showed remarkable personalities and senses of humor. At the end of the presentation, the keeper talked about the loss of habitat facing elephants especially in southeast Asia. The prime culprit for this habitat loss is deforestation caused by rain forest clearing to make room for palm oil plantations.
Photo by K. Bakie, Wikimedia Commons
Several species of elephants are critically endangered because of palm oil generated deforestation. Also several species of orangutans, the Sumatran rhino and the Sumatran tiger and a host of other species are losing their habitats to the bare, open monocultures of palms. Currently, 67 million acres of the Earth’s surface (an area larger than the total area of the United Kingdom!) are covered with palm oil trees. All of these palm oil sites are located within ten degrees latitude of the Equator, and almost all of them were once covered with dense tropical rain forests. The great bulk of the deforestation (and palm oil production) is occurring on the islands of Indonesia and in the forests of Malaysia. Eighty-five percent of the world’s palm oil comes from these two countries.
The Denver Zoo is partnering with a group called “Palm Done Right” to raise awareness of the on-going ecological catastrophe being caused by palm oil production. The elephant keeper described some websites where you can check the products you eat or use and see their palm oil content. Realistically, the keeper said, almost any packaged bread, cookie, cake, pie, snack or prepared food product contained palm oil, as did most soaps, shampoos and cosmetics. Half (or more) of all of the products sold at a grocery store typically contain palm oil.
Oil palm tree. Photo by M. Schmidt, Wikimedia Commons
Palm oil trees are native to West and Central Africa and the oils from their pressed fruits have been used as cooking oil by humans for at least 5000 years. Starting in the 18th Century, palm oils were used as industrial lubricants by the English to help run the machines of their Industrial Revolution. Palm oils were also used to lubricate railroad cars and engines, and later as the foundation material for a wide range of soaps. Lever Brothers (now “Unilever”) and Palmolive (now Colgate-Palmolive) extensively used palm oil in their soaps and growing array of personal care products (lotions, shampoos, cosmetics, etc.). Today, 70% of personal care products contain palm oils or palm oil derivatives.
Palm oil is a highly saturated fat. Chemically, this means that it has very few double bonds between the carbons in its long-chain fatty acids, structurally this means that these fatty acid chains are very straight and cling tightly to each other via intermolecular bonds. Palm oils more closely resemble the saturated fats from animal sources than the fats found in most other plants. Because of its intermolecular clinging forces, palm oil is semisolid at room temperature. It is frequently used as an inexpensive substitute for butter in cooking and baking.
Alternate Names for palm oil in products.
It is often difficult to tell if a food product contains palm oil. There are over 200 different terms for palm oil chemical ingredients. Some of these (only 10%) contain the term “palm,” but the rest can be very obscurely labeled. The chart to the left indicates a few of these possible terms. For a more complete list of these 200 possible palm oil names, please follow this link to view a web document prepared by the “Orangutang Alliance.”
Palm oil is also used as biofuel. In fact, more than half of the considerable volume of palm oil imported into Europe each year is used to make biodiesel fuels. The use of these palm oil biodiesel fuels, however, generates 3X more carbon pollution than the use of more conventional, fossil fuel-derived diesel fuels.
Some food products containing palm oil
Foods containing palm oils especially include the highly processed, convenience foods like chips, cookies, snack foods, bread products, etc. Many health authorities caution against eating these foods and have even indicated that they, along with sugar-rich soft drinks, are the fundamental cause of the obesity epidemic plaguing human populations all around the world. The high caloric nature of the palm oil’s saturated fats and their rapid processing into cholesterols by the liver is definitely one factor in the development of atherosclerotic disease of the coronary arteries and of other arterial systems of the body. Heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, diabetes and more can all be connected to palm oil ingestion.
Human ingestion of palm oils, outside of Africa, was not widely seen until WW1. The rise of the margarine industry during the war changed eating habits and attitudes significantly. In the United States, palm oils were not a significant part of the diet until the 1920’s. It is interesting that coronary arterial disease and heart attacks were not a major cause of death in the United States at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but by mid-century had risen to the #1 cause of deaths in the population.
Oil palm plantation in Indonesia, Photo by A. R. Taim. Wikimedia Commons
So, palm oils is an ecological disaster. The tropical deforestation that the growth of the palm oil trees causes is increasing the extinction pressures on a wide variety of tropical species. The use of these oils for biofuels causes more carbon pollution than simply burning fossil fuels and is, thus, accelerating the already terrifying rate of climate change. Our ingestion of the oils in foods adds to our saturated fat loads and may be accelerating atherosclerotic disease, contributing to obesity, and leading to premature death in a large number of our fellow human beings.
There are some groups (like “Palm Done Right” (which I mentioned before)) trying to educate the public about dangers of palm oil. There are other groups (like the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil” (“RSPO”))that are combinations of palm oil industry producers and users (like Unilever, Mondelez (the giant snack food company), Nestle and a number of financial institutions with deep ties in the industry) and large NGO’s (like the World Wildlife Fund and OXFAM). RSPO and others have been accused as being “green-washing” agents for the palm oil industry. RSPO, in particular, has lavish yearly meetings in exotic locales and very colorful, highly-produced websites and booklets, but is very light on true accountability or auditing of the palm oil producers that they have certified.
The answer to all of this is to use as little palm oil as possible. Don’t buy highly processed food products. Read labels and, when possible, only buy food or personal care items that are not made with palm oil. Homemade cookies, are, after all, even better than Oreos!