Rich flavor without clogged arteries

Why are we so positive about palm oil? Isn’t that the stuff that they tell us to avoid at all costs, that clogs your arteries?

Two distinct kinds of oil come from palm nuts, a red oil from the fibrous fruity covering to the nut and a clear oil from the single big nut. The nut oil is the stuff that they’re talking about. It is highly saturated and shows up in many bakery goods, snack foods, lower quality margarines, Coolwhip, non-dairy creamers, ramen noodles and the like. It’s the “palm” in the “Palmolive”, making high-quality soaps. Most palm oil that makes it to the United States is the nut oil. While it is very useful, it’s not very good for you to eat.

What we and the small farmers of our area produce, and want to produce more of, is the fruit oil, the red stuff. It’s a completely different story. Red palm oil is extremely nutritious, and is one of the great flavored oils of the world, like olive oil. Africans have used it for thousands of years as the basis for delicious sauces. It is very high in Vitamin A and in Vitamin E, and resists going rancid, once stabilized. Furthermore, it is the only commercial oil high in relatively rare isomers of Vitamin E, the tocotrienols. While most Vitamin E supplements on the market today are composed of the more common tocopherols, found in a number of other oils on the market, tocotrienols are believed to be much more potent antioxidants. They say red palm is cholesterol free. Certainly African villagers who consume large quantities of it almost daily have a very low incidence of heart disease. It is claimed to lower the LDL or “bad cholesterol” level in your blood, and raise your HDL or “good” cholesterol level to protect against heart disease. Unfortunately for you, it is expensive and very hard to find in the United States (not impossible!). Who knows? That may change.



It is red palm oil that village producers and Lusekele can easily extract with crude technology. It’s hard to crack the thick nutshells to get the nuts out, and crushing the nuts would require better oil presses than villagers know how to make. Unfortunately, village producers tend to let the fruits go rancid before they cook and process them, producing low-quality acid oil only good for making lye soap. People making cooking oil do it laboriously by hand, and sometimes find themselves in competition for the fruit with the young men producing oil to sell. So you have oil-producing villages where the women complain that they cannot find oil or fruit to cook with. Almost all gets exported to soap factories.

With the high-yielding palms Lusekele promotes, there should be more fruit to go around. That gives women palm fruit for cooking. And men can gather enough fruit quickly to process it before it goes rancid, producing hand-made quality oil, saleable at much higher prices. In seminars, Lusekele is educating the village producer associations on improving their techniques.

Currently Congo consumes all of its palm oil itself and is an importer of the higher quality oil needed for margarines and city-dwellers’ consumption. Higher-yielding palms and better extraction techniques could change that, making Congo a palm oil exporter again. Some good red palm oil could even come to you!

Miriam