everykind

Palm oil: what the evidence actually says

· 3 min read

Palm oil is the most-used cooking oil in the world, and in India it's the default frying fat behind a lot of namkeen, biscuits and instant noodles. It also has a bad reputation. Some of that reputation is deserved, and some of it isn't. Here's what independent research says, and why Everykind still asks snack brands to name their oil.

How palm oil appears on an Indian label

Since 2020, India's food labelling rules have asked brands to name the specific oil in the ingredient list, such as "groundnut oil" or "mustard oil". Palm can therefore show up as palm oil, palmolein (the liquid fraction), "fractionated fat" or "interesterified vegetable fat". Blends must say what's in them, such as "blend of palmolein and groundnut oil", with percentages.

A pack that says only "edible vegetable oil" isn't following that rule. It might be an old pack or a marketplace typo, but either way you can't tell what you're eating. That's the main reason we look for a named oil.

Palm oil and cholesterol

Palm oil is about half saturated fat. The most careful independent review we found pooled 32 feeding trials (Sun et al., Journal of Nutrition, 2015). Compared with oils low in saturated fat, palm oil raised LDL ("bad") cholesterol by a modest amount, and the effect was clearer in the better-designed trials.

Three details from that review matter:

  • More than half of the trials were funded by industry, and those trials tended to report smaller effects. We don't rely on them.
  • Palm oil came out about the same as animal fats such as butter and lard.
  • In the three trials that compared palm with groundnut oil, including two from India, there was no clear difference.

Is palm worse than coconut oil or ghee?

Not on this measure. Coconut oil is around 85–90% saturated fat and ghee around 65–70%. A 2020 review found that coconut oil raised LDL cholesterol compared with non-tropical oils. A large network analysis of 54 trials ranked butter lowest and unsaturated oils such as sunflower and canola highest, with palm and coconut in between.

So nutritionally, palm, coconut oil and ghee belong in the same group: mostly saturated fats. The WHO and ICMR-NIN's 2024 guidelines both suggest keeping saturated fat in check, whichever fat it comes from. We won't tell you coconut-oil chips are better for you than palm-oil chips. They're tastier to many people, and the oil is named, but they're not lighter.

Refining and process contaminants

Almost all palm oil is refined, and refining at high temperatures forms compounds called 3-MCPD esters and glycidyl esters. When EFSA measured these across oils, palm had the highest levels. The EU now caps them in oils, and well-run refineries have brought levels down. We couldn't find an equivalent Indian limit. This is a real reason to prefer less refined fats, but it's about long-term intake, not one pack.

Reused frying oil

A lot of commercial frying reuses oil many times, and palmolein is common there. FSSAI limits how degraded frying oil can get and runs a programme to collect used oil. Most evidence about the effects of repeatedly heated oil comes from animal studies, so we treat it as a reason for good practice, not a proven risk.

Forests

Oil palm has driven a large share of rainforest loss in Southeast Asia. But the IUCN found that simply swapping palm out could need far more land, because palm gives much more oil per hectare than other crops. Where the oil comes from matters more than whether it's palm.

What Everykind does

  • We ask snack packs to name their oil. A named oil is something you can choose. "Vegetable oil" isn't.
  • We don't list snacks that use palm as the frying fat. That's a sourcing and transparency choice, not a claim that palm is uniquely harmful.
  • We mark products where most of the fat is saturated, whether it comes from palm, coconut or ghee.

Sources

This is a summary of published research, not medical advice. Related tags on our standard: Oil named on pack, Unnamed oil.