Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find natural foods. Even in ordinary drinking milk, which, it would seem, does not even need to be replaced with anything, one can find skimmed milk powder and palm oil. At first glance, there is nothing wrong with this, because the taste is not too affected. Yes, indeed, but if you look deeper, it turns out that instead of a healthy drink, we get a completely ambiguous product. Today we will try to find ways to determine palm oil in milk, because the consumer must know what they are selling to him.
What is palm oil?
This is a vegetable fat, which is obtained from the fruits of oil palm. And the oil that is squeezed out of the seeds of the same palm is called palm kernel. In Russia, it began to be used recently, but immediately gained popularity among food manufacturers. But if you look at European countries, here it has been widely used for many decades, this is due to its low cost and availability, as well as its resistance to oxidation, due to which the oil itself and the products prepared with its addition are stored for a very long time.
Where can I find palm oil today?
Surprisingly, it’s much easier to list products where it is not. Below we will talk about how to determine palm oil in milk and other dairy products, but for now, let's dwell a little more on which products it is most often found in. This is mainly the food industry. It is used to make waffles and biscuits, cakes and creams, it is on it that semi-finished foods are fried, the famous hamburgers and popcorn are cooked. Palm oil is an essential component of processed cheeses and condensed milk, combined oils. Today it is added to cottage cheese, milk fat is replaced with it, in general, almost any modern recipe can not do without palm oil.
Useful properties of this product.
If this oil is used so widely around the world, then perhaps this is due to its high usefulness to the body? In fact, palm oil contains a large amount of carotenoids, that is, the strongest antioxidants that are very important for our body. However, they mainly affect the skin and hair, which is used with great success among manufacturers of cosmetics. This oil contains a huge amount of vitamin E, which fights aging. A lot of palm oil and unsaturated fats, oleic and linoleic acid. However, does such a value of a product justify its presence in almost every food product and how to determine palm oil in milk, cottage cheese and other healthy products that should be on our table every day?
Palm oil harm
Surely you've heard a lot about the fact that foods containing transgenic vegetable fats should be excluded from your diet. Scientists sound the alarm, proving that palm oil helps increase blood cholesterol, the rapid development of atherosclerosis and causes various metabolic disorders inside the body. And the matter is not even in the oil itself. In fact, it is much closer in its characteristics to animal fat than to vegetable fat. This is a very refractory fat, which, perhaps, benefits the body, but in minimal quantities. But the fact that only a lazy producer does not add it to our products today leads to the fact that we absorb a huge amount of palm oil without suspecting it.
That is why today we want to talk about how to determine palm oil in milk and other food products so that you can know exactly what was on your table. Although often even a thorough home investigation is not able to help you, because there are a lot of unscrupulous manufacturers who seek with minimal investment in the form of quality products to get as much of the final product and sell it under the brand of natural.
If we talk about dairy products, then their choice should be approached with particular care, because most often we take them for our children. Carefully study the packaging, in addition to using palm oil, unscrupulous manufacturers also paint milk in white. Most often, milk is produced by adding low-fat powder to water, and then the additional introduction of fats. But the mixture is gray. Then the additive is E-171. Just a few drops, and the drink is again snow-white, but in fact you will drink the paint.
Can I use palm oil based foods?
In general, this product cannot be called harmful or dangerous, with the same success you can write pork fat, butter and other products on the same list. However, no one forces you to eat them if you do not want to. To avoid the use of palm oil is almost impossible. Almost all confectionery, cookies, sweets are solid palm oil. But if you can still refuse sweets, then dairy and sour-milk products are what are considered healthy foods and are recommended for daily use.
Nutritionists claim that this fat is quite dangerous for the body if it enters in large quantities. The high melting point (39-40 degrees) leads to the fact that it is practically not processed by the body. It becomes a kind of plasticine that accumulates on the walls of blood vessels, slags the body and provokes an increase in weight. Indirectly, this product can cause the development of cardiovascular and oncological diseases. Therefore, it is worth thinking about eating only village milk, cottage cheese and sour cream, as well as baking tea buns at home.
Pros of Palm Oil for Manufacturers
Of course, no one would have used this product so widely if it had not been economically justified. In addition to the low price, this product has a number of serious advantages. It significantly increases the shelf life of products, it is extremely beneficial for manufacturers of confectionery products. And second, palm oil improves the taste of finished products. It develops addiction, because of this it is so difficult to refuse fast food, ordinary food seems tasteless. Manufacturers use these properties, and they do not always indicate the exact composition on the package. However, there are ways to determine the presence of palm oil in milk at home. Let's take them apart.
Attention to the label
Sometimes the composition of the product is presented to us in a veiled form, the manufacturer expects that a person will not closely study the composition. This often happens. And since determining the presence of palm oil in milk at home is quite difficult, the consumer usually relies on the honesty of the manufacturer. However, it is necessary to study the composition. Start with a title. If the package contains a dairy product, a cocktail product, and the like derivatives, then it’s unlikely that you have natural milk. This applies to other products. All definitions in the form of "cheese", "cottage cheese", "condensed milk" indicate that you have a mass of 95% palm oil. Low cost should also raise suspicion. Natural milk of proven brands is usually much more expensive than others. Finally, the shelf life - the higher it is, the more likely it is that you have a product containing palm oil. If the composition contains “contains vegetable fats”, then this is it.
Detailed study
Compared to all other products, palm oil in milk is not so common. How to determine a fake, we’ll talk now, but such a production is usually not justified due to technological difficulties. This applies to kefir and ryazhenka. Where it is more profitable to establish the production of palm butter, cheese or ice cream, this is where the benefit will be obvious. However, in milk, including it, it also occurs, so let's identify a surrogate.
Since determining the presence of palm oil in milk offhand does not work, open the bag and pour the contents into a glass. Real milk, even with a low fat content, should not be blue. Leave the glass for an hour in the refrigerator. The appearance of a layer of cream on the surface is the best indicator of a quality product. Now take out the glass and leave it warm. If the next day the milk has not deteriorated, or has acquired an unpleasant taste, but has not changed at all, it is milk with palm oil. How to determine its presence in other dairy products, we will talk a little lower, we still have a lot of interesting things ahead.
There is one more point that you need to pay attention to. This is the expiration date printed on the package. Only by this date can we already conclude whether there is palm oil in milk. How to determine by the expiration date, we will tell you. Natural milk is stored for no more than three days, therefore, if the date shows 10 or more days, the composition contains vegetable fat.
Butter or spread
Today it is a rather expensive product, and each of us wants to purchase high-quality oil, which will benefit the body. Speaking about how to determine milk from palm oil, we have already mentioned that the cheaper the product, the greater the chance that it contains vegetable fat. This also works with oil. However, you have already brought your purchase home. Cut a piece and heat to 37 degrees (you can just put it on your palm). The natural product will melt completely and a white film will remain on the surface. But if it contains palm oil, it will take a very long time to wait and hard pieces will remain anyway.
Now try a piece of butter to taste. Real butter melts quickly, has a creamy taste. In palm oil, the teeth bite, it slowly melts in the mouth, forming a "paraffin" film. Leaving the oil in the room, you will see that it will soon become soft, and the pseudo-product will remain solid. As you can see, it is even more difficult to determine palm oil in milk than in its derivatives.
Cheese or cheese product
Probably the first product that led the public to the fact that they began to feed us with a fake. More recently, all retail outlets began to break from cheap cheeses, which seemed to be no different from ordinary ones. If you have no packaging left, you will have to investigate. Cut a piece and lay in the room. If the cheese has plumped and “sweated”, then this is a palm product. Processed cheeses with herbal additives have a cloying creamy taste, and if left in the room, they quickly dry and crack. And of course, you can use the same method that we talked about when we talked about how to determine palm oil in milk at home. That is, study the packaging: if the composition contains vegetable fat (especially if it comes first), then this is a cheese product.
Palm ice cream
Previously, delicious sweets were made exclusively from natural milk. Today the situation has changed, a huge amount of ice cream made from dried milk and palm oil has appeared on the market. But it is precisely him who is so loved by children. First of all, when choosing a quality product, pay attention to trademarks with the GOST icon. If ice cream has already been bought, then grab a piece in your hands and rub it in your palms. If there is a feeling of a film, then there are additives in the composition. If time permits, leave the ice cream on the table. The dairy product becomes soft, but keeps its shape, and its vegetable counterpart melts for a long time and turns into a clear liquid.