Is Palm Oil Bad for You? Separating the Health Question from the Environmental One

July 30, 2026

Palm oil is in roughly half the packaged products in any supermarket — biscuits, chocolate spread, instant noodles, margarine, soap, and a great deal of what’s labelled simply “vegetable oil.”

It also has a worse reputation than almost any other ingredient. Some of that is earned. Some of it isn’t, and the reasons people avoid it are often not the reasons that hold up.

There are three separate questions tangled together here, and they have different answers.

Question 1: Is palm oil nutritionally bad?

Palm oil is roughly 50% saturated fat, mostly palmitic acid, with most of the rest monounsaturated.

That puts it well above olive oil (~14% saturated) and canola (~7%), and well below coconut oil (~90%) or butter (~65%).

The mainstream position from major health bodies is that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat lowers cardiovascular risk. On that basis, palm oil is not a good choice as your main cooking fat — but it is also not uniquely dangerous. It sits in the same broad category as butter and ghee: fine in small amounts, not something to build a diet around.

The honest framing: palm oil in your biscuits is not the health problem. The biscuits are. Palm oil is overwhelmingly found in ultra-processed foods, and it’s the whole product — sugar, refined flour, calorie density — that matters, not one fat in the ingredient list. Swapping the palm oil in a chocolate biscuit for sunflower oil doesn’t make it a health food.

Red palm oil is a different thing

Unrefined red palm oil — the traditional West African cooking fat — is genuinely distinct. It keeps its deep red colour because it’s extremely rich in carotenoids (a precursor to vitamin A) and vitamin E in the form of tocotrienols. It’s still high in saturated fat, but it’s a whole, minimally processed food rather than a refined industrial ingredient.

Most palm oil in packaged goods is refined, bleached and deodorised — which strips all of that out.

Question 2: The processing contaminants

This is the part with genuine scientific weight, and it’s the one almost nobody mentions.

When palm oil is refined at high temperatures, it forms 3-MCPD esters and glycidyl esters — process contaminants that form during the deodorising step. European food safety authorities have assessed these, flagged glycidyl esters in particular as a concern, and industry has since worked to reduce levels through modified refining.

Palm oil tends to form more of these than most other refined oils, because of its composition and the temperatures used.

This is a real, specific, evidence-based reason to be moderate about refined palm oil — and it’s more defensible than the vague “palm oil is toxic” claims that circulate online. It’s also a reason unrefined red palm oil sits in a different category.

This is general food information, not medical advice.

Question 3: The environmental one — and it’s the strongest

For most people who avoid palm oil, this is the actual reason, whether or not they frame it that way.

Palm oil is extraordinarily productive. An oil palm yields several times more oil per hectare than soy, sunflower or rapeseed. That efficiency is genuinely important: switching the world’s palm oil to another crop would require substantially more land, not less.

The problem isn’t the crop, it’s where it’s grown. Expansion has driven deforestation across Indonesia and Malaysia, destroying rainforest and peatland — which releases enormous quantities of stored carbon — and taking habitat from orangutans, tigers and elephants.

RSPO certification (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) exists to address this. Its effectiveness is genuinely contested: it has improved practice in places, and it’s been criticised as insufficiently enforced.

The honest conclusion: boycotting palm oil entirely may not be the environmentally optimal answer, because the replacements need more land. Supporting certified sustainable sourcing, and simply eating fewer ultra-processed products, probably does more good than switching to a palm-oil-free biscuit.

If you want to avoid it: how to read a label

Palm oil hides behind a lot of names:

• Vegetable oil / vegetable fat (in many regions, unlabelled “vegetable oil” is often palm)
• Palmitate, palmate, palm kernel oil, palm stearin, palm olein
• Sodium lauryl sulfate, glyceryl stearate, stearic acid (in cosmetics)
• Vitamin A palmitate

Products most likely to contain it: biscuits, wafers, chocolate spread, instant noodles, margarine, non-dairy creamer, ice cream, packaged cakes, fried snacks.

Products that mostly don’t: whole foods. Fruit, vegetables, oats, nuts, eggs, meat, dairy, plain rice and pasta. If your diet is mostly food that never needed an ingredient list, the question mostly answers itself.

The practical summary

If you want one takeaway: worrying about palm oil in an otherwise whole-food diet is a rounding error. Worrying about how much packaged food you eat is not.

Where we stand

We don’t use palm oil — not as a marketing position, but because Taza is made from blended whole food. Our fats come from peanut butter, tahini, almonds and flaxseed, because those are what the recipes need.

That’s the same principle behind the rest of our labelling: we say “no refined sugar” rather than “sugar-free,” and we list every ingredient and allergen. The useful question about any food isn’t “does it contain the villain ingredient?” — it’s “is this actually made of food?”

For the related question of which fat to actually cook with, see the healthiest cooking oil.

Whole food, blended fresh. See what’s in it →

This article is general information about food and nutrition, not medical advice. Taza Daily products are food, not a treatment for any condition. For health concerns, consult a qualified professional.