Palm Oil: Everyday Convenience or a Silent Threat to Our Health and Planet?

Palm Oil: Everyday Convenience or a Silent Threat to Our Health and Planet?

KAKALI DAS

Palm oil might sound like just another oil sitting quietly in the background of your kitchen, but the truth is, it has silently taken over our lives. It hides in your food, slips into your soap, smoothens your lipstick, and sneaks into your snacks. It makes your chips crispier, your ice cream creamier, your candle flame steadier, and it is everywhere.

In India, it is in almost every fried snack sold on the streets, from samosas to pakoras to burgers. The shocking part? You are probably consuming it every single day without even realising it.

India is the largest importer of palm oil in the world. This is not a badge of pride, it is a red warning sign. Palm oil is not just another harmless kitchen ingredient. Doctors have been raising alarms for years about its link to heart disease and even cancer. The truth is, eating out too often and indulging in processed foods is bad for your health, and palm oil is one of the main culprits.

Palm oil comes from the fruit of the oil palm tree, a plant that thrives in tropical climates. It is one of the cheapest and most heavily produced vegetable oils in the world.

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But here’s what makes it so dangerously popular: it is incredibly productive, giving a huge yield per hectare of land, and it contains about 50% saturated fat, far higher than most other oils. That saturated fat keeps products shelf-stable, which food companies love. It keeps prices low, which makes it a favourite in the market. But what it does inside your body is far from harmless.

On average, each person in the world consumes around 8 kilograms of palm oil a year, often without knowing it. It is in over 200 common products, from biscuits and instant noodles to soaps, shampoos, and cosmetics.

And in India, it is practically unavoidable. In 2014, the newly elected Narendra Modi government launched the National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP) with the aim of achieving self-reliance in edible oils. In 2021, it was renamed the National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm, with the government announcing an investment of ₹110.4 billion ($1.32 billion).

India is the world’s largest importer of edible oils. In 2021 alone, we consumed more than 9 million metric tons. Seventy percent of the vegetable oil we use is imported, and almost 60% of that is palm oil. You, me, everyone, we are all consuming it, often every day.

Between November 2022 and October 2023, the country imported 16.47 million tonnes of edible oils, including 10 million tonnes of palm oil, an increase from the previous year’s 14.19 million tonnes and 8 million tonnes, respectively. Palm oil finds its way into a wide range of products, from packaged foods to soaps, cosmetics, ice cream, and more. You, me, everyone, we are all consuming it, often every day.

While oil palm cultivation was already underway in several southern states, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Karnataka, the Modi government sought to expand production to the northeastern region, including Assam.

Initially, Assam allocated around 1,000 hectares (2,741 acres) of agricultural land for oil palm cultivation. However, recognising its vast potential, the Indian Institute of Oil Palm Research in 2014 identified a total of 375,428 hectares (927,703 acres) as suitable for farming.

Recently, centre allowed 5% tea estate land in Assam for oil palm cultivation. The path has been cleared for oil palm cultivation in the state’s tea estates, which will now be eligible to access schemes under the National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm (NMEO-OP) for planting oil palm trees.

The danger lies in its high levels of saturated fats and palmitic acid, both known to raise cholesterol. Raised cholesterol clogs arteries, triggering heart attacks and strokes. This isn’t just theory, history has already shown us the cost. In the 1980s, Mauritius subsidised palm oil to make it cheaper for its people. Consumption skyrocketed, but so did cases of heart disease.

The problem became so severe that the government had to scrap the subsidy and promote soybean oil instead. The World Health Organization studied the results, cholesterol levels in the population dropped by 15%. That’s how direct the link is.

It gets worse. The European Food Safety Authority warns that when palm oil is heated to high temperatures, as it is in frying, it can produce harmful chemicals. One of these, called glycidyl fatty acid esters, breaks down into glycidol in the body. Glycidol has been shown to cause tumours in animal studies.

Critics might say more research is needed, but how much more evidence do we need before we act? Do we wait until the damage is irreversible?

Some researchers suggest a 20% tax on palm oil, arguing that it could save more than 350,000 lives by reducing heart attacks and strokes. But while governments debate policies, the oil continues to flood into our food supply. That means the responsibility, for now, falls on us. Reading labels. Choosing healthier oils like mustard or soybean at home. Eating out less often. These are small actions, but they add up.

The problem is not only about health. Palm oil is one of the most destructive agricultural products for our planet. Indonesia and Malaysia produce about 90% of the world’s supply. To feed the world’s demand, they are cutting down rainforests at a terrifying pace.

From 1992 to 2010, 9.6 million hectares of land, much of it lush tropical forest, were turned into oil palm plantations in just three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea.

This isn’t just about losing trees. It’s about destroying the lungs of our planet, wiping out habitats for tigers, orangutans, and countless species, and releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

Often, the cheapest way to clear land is to burn it. The smoke chokes the air for miles, and the carbon released accelerates climate change. Even more destructive is the draining and burning of peatlands – wetlands that store enormous amounts of carbon in their soil. Once drained and burned, all that stored carbon is released, undoing centuries of natural carbon storage in just days.

Scientists warn that Southeast Asia’s peatlands could almost vanish by 2030 if palm oil farming keeps expanding at the current rate.

And here comes the cruel irony: one of the big reasons palm oil farming exploded was Europe’s push for “clean” biofuels. Palm oil biodiesel was marketed as an eco-friendly alternative to fossil fuels. But the truth was that clearing forests and burning peatlands for palm plantations released so much carbon that the biofuel was often worse for the climate than the diesel it replaced.

By 2019, the European Commission finally admitted the damage and banned subsidies for palm oil in biofuels.

The problem, however, Is not easy to solve. Millions of small farmers in producing countries depend on palm oil for their livelihoods. For them, it’s a source of income and survival. This makes palm oil a deeply tangled issue, one where environmental urgency collides with human dependency. Simply banning it is not the whole answer. We need solutions that protect both the planet and the people.

There are efforts to promote “sustainable palm oil,” but critics argue these are often just greenwashing. Enforcement is weak, and deforestation still happens under the label of “sustainability.” Until real change happens at the production level, reducing consumption remains the most powerful action ordinary people can take.

Palm oil has become the perfect example of how something can be cheap for companies but incredibly costly for both our bodies and our planet. It clogs our arteries and clogs the Earth’s lungs. It is the invisible thread linking your roadside samosa to a burning peatland in Indonesia. And it’s time we paid attention.

We might not be able to completely avoid palm oil, it’s too deeply woven into modern supply chains, but we can limit it. We can choose products without it, cook more at home, and support brands that source truly deforestation-free palm oil. We can pressure governments to set limits and enforce stricter rules. Every packet we put back on the shelf, every label we read, every healthier choice we make, it sends a signal.

Palm oil’s story is a lesson in how the world’s obsession with cheap, mass-produced convenience can quietly create a crisis that threatens both human health and the climate.

Every bite, every purchase, every drop of oil we choose matters. Palm oil is not just an ingredient, it’s a silent killer of our hearts, our forests, and our future. If we keep consuming blindly, we are signing away both our health and our planet. The change starts in our kitchens, in our shopping baskets, and in our voices demanding better.

The question now is whether we will keep looking the other way or finally act before it’s too late.

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