Red Palm Oil Analysis

In the Dr. Oz video, Dr. Oz is promoting red palm fruit oil. Through demonstrations, Dr. Oz claimed two effects of consuming red palm fruit oil: to clean artery plaque and help burn belly fat. According to Dr. Oz, red palm fruit oil is essential to keep blood vessel in the heart open. Dr. Oz and his assistant claimed that although red palm fruit oil is saturated fat, it is different from the “bad” saturated fat such as butter. Dr. Oz had two models of artery for demonstration. Both of the models have some white chunk sticking onto it to represent the plaque in artery. Then Dr. Oz’s assistant poured a cup of liquid, which represent the “bad” fat, and the liquid then stick to the blood vessel model. Then a cup of red palm oil was poured onto

The first demonstration is about pouring two kinds of liquid into the artery model. The first cup of the liquid is very sticky, and Dr. Oz said this is like the regular fat in our blood vessel. The assistant used scary phrases such as “the saturated fat will cause blockage in blood vessel and ultimately cause death.” The assistant basically made it into “if you are consuming saturated fat, you will die.” The assistant also used slanted words as he saying the saturated fat is sticky like molasses. This metaphor exaggerated the stickiness of the saturated fat, which makes the audiences have a negative view of how saturated fat is processed in the blood vessel. The assistant also used scare tactics; he tried to scare the audience with the claim that saturated fat could lead to death. In this way, Dr. Oz and the assistant could persuade the audiences to buy the product because the audience’s fear of the possible negative consequences of saturated

I searched for any studies that may indicate that red palm fruit oil could increase the human body metabolism and thus makes one burn fat and lose weight. However, a blog post from Berkeley said that the red palm fruit oil has the same fat content as the refined palm oil. Thus I really doubt the claimed heal effect of red palm fruit oil: if the red palm fruit oil does not contain any special content form the regular refined palm oil, then what makes it so “magical” as Dr. Oz had claimed. But what if regular palm oil can also increase the human body metabolism rate and thus promote weight loss? Thus I also searched for papers on the relationship between palm oil and human heath effect. I found a paper done by Sutapa Mukherjee and Analava Mitra at Indian Institute of Technology. The paper exanimated the heal effects of palm oil. Although palm oil is high in saturated fat, it will not cause a significant cholesterol rise if it is consumed in a reasonable amount. But it seems that this paper I found is about how palm oil is not harmful for human body instead of talking about the benefits of palm