Barney and I travelled to Borneo in 2011 and fell in love with orangutans. They are beautiful creatures but unfortunately, they are on the verge of becoming extinct. Why? Palm oil plantations.
Borneo's forests have been rapidly wiped out over the last few decades to plant palm oil plantations instead. Orangutans are losing their habitats and therefore are dying. Malaysia is the world's largest exporter of palm oil having exported 18 million tonnes of palm oil products in 2011.
What products contain palm oil? Doritos, Pringles, nutella, Colgate toothpaste, cleaning spray, packet cookies, instant noodles....the list goes on and on. Now, most products won't list palm oil on their ingredients list. Instead, it will just say vegetable oil. Now, if it states vegetable oil, it doesn't always mean palm oil. If a product's saturated fat content is over 40% of it's total fat content, it will almost always have palm oil in it. Only 3 vegetable oils must be labelled in food products in Australia and New Zealand. Those are peanut oil, sesame oil and soy bean oil.
Barney and I have been trying to do more research into the products we buy to avoid buying products with palm oil. It is not always easy but there is a facebook page that lists the products that contain it and then offers similar products that don't. We have found this to be helpful. We also try to avoid packaged products and make things ourselves. It's not always easy, but we are getting there!
I'm not sure if this is a similar situation in Canada or if its more in Australia because we are closer to most of the countries producing palm oil.
I'm not asking anyone to go out and check every product they buy, but I just thought I would share something that Barney and I are passionate about. It would be a pity to see the orangutans become instinct when it could have been easily prevented.
*I got my information off Wikipedia and the palm oil facebook page*
1 comment:
Hi Lynn,
Very well written post. I am not sure if palm oil is popular in our products or not. I can see if I can research it more. Great work on the post and research!
Love brother Matt
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