Last week, I read that a high profile company has turned to palm oil to make chocolate healthier. We live in a crazy
society, but it just got a little crazier. Several things infuriate me about
this situation, and it makes me even more infuriated that for now ‘all’ I can
do is blog about it. So! First things first…
When I buy a
chocolate bar, I am purchasing it for the sole reason of I feel like junk food.
If I wanted to be healthy, I would be buying foods that advertised themselves
as low fat; low calories; and “diet food”. (We all know the “diet food” is for
girls, “MAX” for the guys. That’s one for another time and another place,
though.) If you go to KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut; if you eat
Cadburys, Thorntons, Milka, Haribo or chocolate biscuits; and if you drink
Costas, Starbucks, milkshakes, sodas and energy drinks, you are making a
conscious decision to put yourself at risk from these fatty foods- especially if
you don’t eat in moderation. (Pizza Hut, for example, sell the almost 3000
calorie cheeseburger-stuffed-crust pizza. It is common sense to accept that this
is not healthy.) If you do eat them in moderation, then it is fine to eat them, because you are
probably living a reasonably healthy lifestyle. However, if most people were
faced with a so-called “healthier chocolate”, they would eat it, and they would
probably eat twice as much. That is the way it works- at least, the way I know
I work. Obviously, the chocolate isn’t that healthy, and will probably soon
start to produce negative health effects. But hey- you tried- it was advertised
as healthy chocolate! Obesity is an unnervingly common in our society, and a
challenge to the NHS. I don’t feel advertising healthier chocolates will help
the NHS.
My other big problem with this turning chocolate healthy is
the product. Palm oil is my main problem. For those of you who don’t know what
palm oil is, a brief overview: the African Oil Palm Tree produces a vegetable
oil, called palm oil. There is a rise in demand of palm oil for biofuels, but
there has been a noticeable demand for this product being in foods. According
to GreenPeace, over 70% of palm oil ends up in food. My mother and I have both
noticed it in foods from Linda McCartney’s Sausages to a high percentage of
food M&S branded foods. Palm oil can be on the ingredients list as
“vegetable oil”, because technically it is, amongst several other names. In
fact, www.saynotopalmoil.com has a
list of the 300 alternative names that can be used for palm oil. So far, all
fairly innocent. However, this oil has to be harvested somehow.
This is where the
real problem lies. Every hour (probably the time it took me to type up this
blog), in Indonesia and Malaysia only, an area of the rainforest the size of
300 football pitches is cleared to make room for palm oil plantations. Not only
is this destroying valuable natural resources, that could hold the rare cure to
any number of medical conditions, it is destroying habitats. Orang-utans have
since become highly endangered. Understandable, after 90% of their habitat has
been destroyed. However, it gets worse. These huge areas of land have to be
cleared somehow, and that somehow is through fire. The burning of rainforests
is the second biggest contributor to global warming, which is naturally damaging
to the planet, without our carbon dioxide emissions. Not only does the soot
cause health problems for locals, whose land may have been stolen, or taken
through threat, for these plantations. There are animals in these burning forests.
Sumatran tiger and rhinoceros, Asian elephant, orangutans, wild ox, barding
deer, giant flying squirrel, proboscis monkey, gibbons, langurs, and clouded
leopard, to name but a few. If these animals aren’t already endangered, they
probably will be soon. All for some oil we never used to use anyway, because it
doesn’t seem to do very much for us.
Even if this palm oil does make our chocolate healthier,
doesn’t the global warming and pollution counteract that? Those medical resources
burning in the rainforest fires are of more use to us than the Kit Kat
replacing 0.4 grams of trans-fat with palm oil? I highly doubt that extra 0.4
grams of trans-fat would make much difference to us anyway. 0.4 grams worth of
palm oil being harvested, multiplied by the 17.6 billion Kit Kat fingers made
every year will probably make a difference. That is just for Kit Kats- palm oil
is used in hair products, foodstuffs, make-up…
Kit Kats have made the change because of a government driven
pledge, making retailers make our food healthier, theoretically saving NHS
millions of pounds in aborted future obesity cases. What happens when the NHS
receives global warming related illnesses? Global warming certainly kills.
Surely, as said earlier, advertising fast food as healthier will make people
eat it more, lulled into a false sense of security?
Please leave thoughts, sympathy notes for endangered animals
and opinions in comments. Thank for reading chupa chups! x
Research links:
The weekly magazine Notebook’s article (released Sunday 10th
November) on Kit Kat and palm oil
