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www.gourmetnews.com Gourmet News • Oli e Aceti 7 An interview with Haznita Husin with the Malaysian Palm Oil Council. GN: What is palm oil? HH: Palm oil is obtained from the flesh or mesocarp of the palm oil fruit. Like olive oil, palm oil is fruit oil. Palm oil should not be mistaken for palm kernel oil, which is extracted from the kernel or seed of the palm fruit. Therefore, the oil palm fruit is unique. From the fruit, two dis- tinct types of oils are produced: palm oil and palm kernel oil. Both are edible oils, but with very different chemical composition, physical properties and applications. Each palm fruit produces about 90 percent palm oil and 10 percent palm kernel oil. Palm oil has a balanced composition of both saturated and un- saturated fatty acids. Coupled with nature's gift of high vitamin E content, the oil is naturally very stable. Palm oil contains an equal proportion of saturated and unsatu- rated fatty acids. It's particularly rich in the saturated palmitic acid (44 percent), with substantial amounts of the monounsaturated oleic acid (40 percent) and smaller amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids (10 percent). Palm oil has had a history of food use for more than 5,000 years in more than 130 countries worldwide. GN: What food products contain palm oil? HH: Palm oil's semi-solid properties make it a favorite ingredient among the food processors. From palm oil you can have unlimited oil fractions for use of any kind of food applications. The oil could be incorporated into a wide variety of food products, which in- clude cooking oils, margarines, noodles, shorten- ings, vegetable ghee, bakery products, chocolates, hot beverages, coffee creamers and ice cream. Due to its excellent stability, it is the number-one choice in the world as frying oil for foods such as instant noodles, French fries, potato crisps, dough- nuts and fried meats and snacks. The natural solid nature of palm stearin make it most ideal for formulating solid fats such as vanaspati, margarine, shortenings and other bakery fats. More importantly, these palm fats are not hydrogenated and therefore are trans-fatty acids free. GN: Is palm oil a trans fat? Will palm oil consumption raise my blood cholesterol level? HH: No. Palm oil's natural semi-solid properties and the versatility of blending with its solid fraction, palm stearin, make hydrogena- tion of palm oil unnecessary. Therefore, food products containing palm oil as its sole or main ingredient are essentially trans-free. A re-examination of the data of some early published western studies that included palm oil showed that when palm oil replaced the habitual fats of Western diets, blood cholesterol levels in the sub- jects did not go up, but instead were reduced from 7 to 38 percent. GN: What's so special about red palm oil? HH: Red palm oil (RPO) is the only commercially available oil that contains substantial amounts of the natural plant pigments called 'carotenoids' (about 550 µg/g), as well as vitamin E (600 µg/g) comprising both tocotrienols (65 percents) and alpha-toco- pherol (35 percent). GN The Skinny on Palm Oil A S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E C T I O N