Is palm oil bad for you?

Is palm oil bad for you?

Palm oil sits in a middle ground. It's roughly half saturated fat, which can raise LDL cholesterol more than liquid oils like olive or canola, but it contains no trans fat and has generally looked better than the hydrogenated shortenings it replaced in processed food.

That combination is why the health reputation of palm oil is so split. It shows up in close to half of packaged foods sold in Western countries, according to registered dietitian Kristin Gillespie, prized for being cheap, shelf-stable and semi-solid at room temperature without needing hydrogenation. That same semi-solid quality comes from a saturated fat content most liquid cooking oils don't have, and it's exactly the property that made palm oil the food industry's default replacement once manufacturers needed to move away from partially hydrogenated oils, the artificial trans fats that carry a far worse cardiovascular track record than any natural saturated fat.

What palm oil actually is

Palm oil runs about 44 to 51 percent saturated fat, mostly palmitic acid, with roughly 40 percent monounsaturated fat and about 10 percent polyunsaturated fat. For comparison, olive oil is around 14 percent saturated and canola oil around 7 percent, meaning palm oil carries three to six times the saturated fat of the liquid oils most nutrition guidance favors.

Gillespie notes that unrefined palm oil is "rich in tocotrienols, which is a form of vitamin E," though refined palm oil, the kind used in most packaged food, loses some of that benefit during processing. "I don't know that I would go so far as to say that palm oil is 'healthy' or 'good for you,'" she says, "but it can be a good option when compared to other oils."

It's worth separating palm oil from a different, more famous controversy. Soybean, canola, corn and sunflower oils, often grouped together as "seed oils," face a separate debate over their polyunsaturated fat and omega-6 content. Palm oil is pressed from the fruit of the oil palm, not a seed, and its own controversy is almost entirely about saturated fat and LDL cholesterol, a different question with different evidence behind it.

What the WHO and the saturated fat rules say

In 2023, the World Health Organization updated its global guidance to recommend no more than 10 percent of daily calories from saturated fat and under 1 percent from trans fat. The guidance names palm oil directly, grouping it with other solid fats to limit: "saturated fatty acids can be found in fatty meat, dairy foods, and hard fats and oils such as butter, ghee, lard, palm oil and coconut oil." That puts palm oil squarely inside the category health authorities want people eating less of, alongside foods most people already associate with caution.

What happens to cholesterol when you actually test it

A 2019 meta-analysis in Advances in Nutrition pooled 9 randomized controlled trials comparing palm olein, a common liquid fraction of palm oil, against other cooking oils in 533 people, versus 542 on comparison oils. The overall pooled difference in LDL cholesterol against all other oils combined wasn't statistically significant, though the result varied a lot by what it was compared against, a sign the real answer depends on the comparison, not a single verdict.

Split apart, the picture gets clearer. Against heavily saturated oils like coconut oil and lard, palm olein produced meaningfully lower LDL cholesterol. Against unsaturated oils like canola, high-oleic sunflower and peanut oil, there was no significant difference either way, meaning palm oil didn't show an advantage over those liquid oils. The honest summary: palm oil beats the most saturated fats, but doesn't beat the unsaturated ones nutritionists already recommend.

What it means for heart disease risk, not just cholesterol

Cholesterol numbers are one thing; actual cardiovascular outcomes are another. A 2018 systematic review in PLOS ONE looked specifically at palm oil and cardiovascular disease risk. It found that palmitic acid, palm oil's dominant fatty acid, was associated with roughly 2.76 times the odds of a heart attack in one pooled analysis the review examined. Set against actual trans fat, though, palm oil still came out ahead in places: compared with soybean oil containing a small 5 percent trans fat blend, palm oil carried somewhat higher heart attack odds, but compared with soybean oil containing a larger 22 percent trans fat blend, the difference wasn't statistically significant, meaning palm oil wasn't clearly worse than the heavily trans-fatted version either.

The review's own conclusion is the most useful part: it "could not establish strong evidence for or against palm oil consumption" and called for further research, adding that "a healthy overall diet should still be prioritised for good cardiometabolic health." That is a genuinely mixed, inconclusive verdict, not proof of harm, and it is consistent with the comparator-dependent pattern the cholesterol trials above also showed.

The other controversy: it's not about your arteries

Palm oil carries a second, entirely separate controversy: deforestation and habitat loss linked to how and where it's farmed. Environmental groups and food-industry critics have raised that concern for years, and it's a legitimate one. But it's a different question from the nutrition question this article covers, tied to farming and sourcing practices rather than the oil's chemistry, and the two shouldn't be conflated when judging palm oil's effect on your own health.

Our take

Palm oil is not a health villain and it's not a health food either. It beats the fully saturated fats and trans fats it has replaced in much of the food supply, but it still loses to liquid oils like olive and canola on cholesterol, and the cardiovascular evidence remains genuinely unsettled, much like the mixed research we've covered on fish oil and heart disease risk. Treat it the way you'd treat any saturated fat: fine in moderation, not something to build a diet around.

This is general information, not medical advice. Talk to a clinician before changing anything, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, or managing a condition.