Oil is a necessity in Filipino kitchens. Neutral oils like palm are favored because they impart no flavor and they often have a high smoke point making them suitable for frying and sauteing. But consumers often make one mistake when choosing their palm oil from a lineup of available options: they choose a lighter-colored oil.
At first, it may seem intuitive to go for lighter-colored oil because they seem the most “pure.” But upon closer inspection you will find, especially with palm oil, that light is not always right.
Golden standard
Palm oil is extracted from the pulp of oil palm fruit, a reddish-orange date-like nut that’s rich in naturally occurring antioxidants alpha- and beta-carotene. Carotene, a form of vitamin A, is responsible for the red, orange, and yellow colors of fruits and vegetables.
After extraction, palm oil is subjected to refining, bleaching, and deodorizing to filter out impurities and make it shelf-stable—all standard practices in the manufacturing of any plant oils. Because its source, the oil palm fruit is reddish-orange, naturally, oil extracted from it will have a golden hue. Through the refinement process, this color is somehow mellowed down to a desirable glistening gold.
The good in gold
A lighter-colored palm oil means it has been repeatedly subjected to processing, stripping it off of the good stuff: antioxidants, essential vitamins, and fatty acids like Omega 6 and Omega 9. And you want those things in your oil because cooking in it means your food is infused with it—all the good and the bad that comes with it.
One of the essential vitamins you’re probably missing out on by choosing a lighter-colored oil is vitamin E in the form of tocopherols and tocotrienol. These are antioxidants that fight against free radicals that can cause cancer, among other diseases.
Repetitive chemical and physical refining reduce the vitamin E content of palm oil by up to 50 to 80 percent. You want to at least get 20mg of tocopherols and tocotrienol for every 100g of palm oil.
So next time you buy oil, make sure to go for gold, not light.
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