Palm oil is not unhealthy. Th reason it's bad is because the cheapest way to produce it is to destroy rainforest to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. UK consumers managed through campaigning to force the industry to source 50% of palm oil from non-tropical origins. When the worlwide demand for tropical palm oil drop enough, tropical deforestation will drop.

the health angle comes from the proportions of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated fats presented in the mix, but so does the mechanical angle that makes one mix more useful than another in recipes, i.e. spreads and biscuits; the saturated fats that are responsible for soft spreads and buttery biscuits are also the one that are bad for health.

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.

> the saturated fats ... are bad for health.

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

It’s recently in dispute, but calling it a “myth” seems strong as it was the medically agreed upon stance for decades.

I would be interested in hearing the dissent here. To call it a myth would imply that it is intrinsically wrong, but is that proven fact or just newly popular thinking?

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

there's an abyss between "saturated fat are evil" and "eating a stick of butter every day is great for your health" but apparently the forum is looking for a science based dichotomy, which cannot exist because nutrition is all about daily intake - hence why my original post topic was about proportions and only tangentially related to saturated fat health, and why I carefully avoided to answer to the clear bait: notice how the same poster is claiming two post above that palm oil is good for health, but he doesn't provide any citation, instead pretending that everyone else does the homework for him.