Palm oil is not the devil. We are just using a lot of fat (and sugar) almost everywhere. Even extra virgin olive oil is bad if you use too much: it is liquid fat, and it has more of it compared to butter (because butter has water in it :-D)! Using it for your pastries would not make you healthier.

Just use the right oil/fat in the right quantity.

I miss the "save the rainforest" focus on environmentalism in the 90s. I think it was more emotionally compelling for social action.

Yes, I agree with you very strongly, and I would love to know more about how many others are out there, especially professionals in the conservation field, that share this concern. The modern obsession with long-term planet-level climate change threatens, unless we qualify it, to be a terrible thing for short-term habitat conservation. And short-term habitat conservation is everything: extinction is for ever. Human suffering is very sad, and we will do our best to alleviate it, but nevertheless we as a species absolutely must not cause extinction of other species on Earth. That is for eternity and transcends human concerns. Wild animal species have extremely specific habitat/vegetation requirements. I think that a generation is growing up that does not understand this: they think that planetary atmospheric concerns are the be-all-and-end-all of conservation concerns, they think that all trees are the same and all birds smaller than a pigeon are the same; they think that reforestation is a solution regardless of species composition of the replacement trees. They seem to be prepared for their great-grandchildren to live in a future where we have averted large-scale economic hardship and suffering but sadly lost the Earth's remaining rainforests during the 21st century. That is not an acceptable future. But currently, the world's governments and super-governmental organizations are, when it comes to environmental issues, entirely focused on climate change. They are not saving the rainforests.

What's troubling, to me, is that "saving the rainforest" or nature conservancy in general is much more appealing to political conservatives than climate change. In theory, it is much easier to get large companies and nation states to take actions to protect lands than to reduce consumption.

But that's where the philosophy of environmentalism can diverge. Are humans capable of being part of nature? Or are we a cancer on the system? An enormous number of people are very misanthropic these days, on principle.

It's frustrating, also, because consistently-- when people get richer, they care more about preserving nature.

This suggests a natural harmony between economic growth and environtal protection. That idea is very offensive to some; but the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of optimism.

But, for example, in the southern Amazonian areas of northern Brazil, deforestation is carried out by logging companies and ranch owners, and the ranch and logging company owners mostly come from richer areas of southern Brazil. So local people are poor, and the people from areas with higher GDP are the ones doing the deforesting. At the very least you need to explain why what you said isn't contradicted by obvious examples like that.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. It's quite high in saturated fatty acids, but not anywhere near as much as, say, coconut oil.

> buy 30+ types of margarine

Why buy margarine in the first place? Why not actual butter? Or fats like peanut oil, coconut oil, olive oil, .. ?

> glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine

What's wrong with any of those? What you put in your body is your choice, but this just sounds like FUD to me.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14...

Margarine seems to be more prominent outside of the U.S. There's usually only a few brands of margarine on American grocery shelves but in Canada there's a whole wall of margarine next to a small shelf of butter. It seems very strange to my American eyes.

These are not novel discoveries, this is mountains of research done over the last couple of decades. Cut down on saturated fats and tilt your balance of unsaturated fat more towards omega-3.

The reason why fast food is unhealthy is not because of the specific oils used (and all of the ones you mentioned are much better than the trans fat nightmares we used to deep fry in). It's unhealthy because it's super heavy in calories, and because they're almost entirely carbs and fats and low-quality protein, and almost completely bereft of vitamins and minerals and fiber. The fat+salt+carbs combo keeps you from being satiated until you're stuffed full.

Focusing solely on the fats used during cooking is myopic. You have to look at the whole picture.

I certainly agree about trans-fats. I would never suggest they're healthy. I don't think satiety is the full story about why fast food is unhealthy, nor just the lack of nutrients. It seems to be actively bad. And I'm obviously not focusing on only the fats used during cooking, but I was responding to a comment about palm oil, not about nutrition in general.

Edit: I'm not convinced saturated fats are healthier, either, but I think the science here is very sketchy and generally of low quality.

It matters how much of that stereotypical food you eat, and the totality of the ingredients.

Plus how sedentary people are, how many snacks they eat outside of meals, hobbies, work, and a whole host of other factors.

The general scientific consensus is pretty clear that saturated fats are unhealthy, trans fats are the worst, and dietary cholesterol seems to not impact serum cholesterol. Science marches on,

on the other hand palm oil is just a collection of acids, primarily the saturated palmitic acid, but while the naming stuck because it was firstly isolated there, most oil and fats contains a similar set of the same fatty acids in different proportions; pure butter contains like 15% of naturally occurring palmitic acid, and olive oil contains likewise 5-10% of the stuff.

so well you can take any kind of oil, dilute or reinforce it with saturated / monounsaturated fats, and change it's healthiness in proportion of the rest of the recipe, but in doing so you also change their mechanical properties.

Citation needed. Isn't this a decades-old myth?

The medical establishment still maintains that saturated fats are less healthy than unsaturated fats as standard advice.