AHA recommendations and USFDA legislated health claims achieved by partnering palm and soybean oils

26/07/2008 (The Daily Star) - Nature has been generous in endowing palm oil with a composition that is uniquely balanced between the saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. Even when programming this higher level of saturates in the oil, nature’s consideration for optimisation was already apparent – the biology of the oil palm dictates that this saturate be in the form of palmitic acid (C16:0), the same saturated fatty acid that is most abundant in our body and throughout most of nature’s creations.

As if further serious thought was given to this composition by nature, most of the palmitic acid in palm oil is placed within the triglyceride molecule. This is in stark contrast to palmitic acid from animal sources.

Within the modern concept of optimum nutrition, and in a food based environment that is reflected by highly processed foods, palm oil should have been rated higher by the nutrition gurus of this world. Unfortunately, the “fat-world” is overwhelmed by a predominance of how unhealthy saturated fats are and how these are implicated in a number of degenerative diseases, including coronary heart diseases (CHD).

Dietary recommendations are thus numerous, with many authoritative recommendations targeting lower and lower levels of saturated fat intake even when it is obvious that such efforts would be futile since product functionality and consumer acceptance are often significantly compromised.

The story behind palm oil is indeed a classical case study. Publications in the science and lay press were highly successful in convincing the often uninformed consumer that saturated fat consumption must be lowered to reduce increasing CHD risk. There was much merit in these concepts but the down side was the fact that the type of saturates was never differentiated from each other especially if they were of plant or animal origin.

In the 1980s, palm oil as a food commodity oil began making significant inroads into the marketplace, often at the expense of soybean oil. The anti-palm, anti-tropical oil campaign that popped its ugly head in the mid-1980s created the scare tactics that resulted in the removal of palm oil from many food applications, especially those of solid fat formulations. The anti-palm oil campaign is now openly acknowledged as a commercial ploy by the competing oils against palm oil so that they could take advantage of the marketplace. The void left by palm oil was flooded by the use of partially hydrogenated oils and fats that were often touted to be far more heart healthy than the palm oil components that they so effectively replaced.

This indeed signaled the rapid increase of trans fatty acids in our foods and recorded peak levels of consumption in North American and Europe during these periods. These trends were often fueled by health messages that sought to position polyunsaturated margarines and related fat formulations as the healthy alternative to saturated “tropical oils” despite higher content of trans fatty acids (TFA).

-Kalyana Sundram and Yusof Basiron-