Palm oil favors tumor expansion

> humans often are just not equipped to fight cancer

But we are? The immune system is constantly at work killing malignant (or otherwise dysfunctional) cells. Cells themselves have mechanisms to commit suicide (apoptosis) if they are not working properly.

It's only when the several mechanisms we have get defeated at the same time (often due to mutations) that cancer can even develop.

If you mean, we are not as equipped as elephants or whales to fight cancer, then that's true.

> there’s little survival advantage for people who can effectively fight cancer after their reproductive age

There's some advantage, but as far as nature's concerned, there's indeed diminishing returns. As in, for the individual that has already reproduced there's no reason to stay alive, but this is beneficial for the offspring - until they are adults. So there's some selective pressures there, specially if you are competing against another group.

Starting from about 6 years ago, Palm Oil began showing up in practically everything, even those foods you wouldn't expect to find it. Check the ingredient list in that jar of peanut or almond butter. I make a point of buying peanut or almond butter that has only one ingredient.

To clarify - you're not saying that meat, cheese, and butter include palm oil, but rather just one particular naturally-occurring chemical component of palm oil which occurs naturally in many sources. Palmitic acid is just a long-chain fat molecule.

Of note is the monstrosities we call chickens today are a product of breeding contests in the 1940s [0] (but does that mean there is anything wrong with eating them? who's to say).

It seems a lot more people today are taking a critical look at what they eat, though often excluding broad categories based on feeling rather than hard science. At first this looks reactionary, but on closer inspection one realizes that the science involved is typically biased or just lacking. We've invested comparatively little into understanding the downsides of modern food products like vegetable oil, but the little windows we have indicate they may be causing whole hosts of human maladies from dementia to type 2 diabetes [1]. Nutrition constitutes the inputs to the complex biological system, and large changes (eg disease) can end up being the result of nonlinear processes started by changing these inputs. Another example is a lack of magnesium in the western diet, through both soil depletion and food processing, leading to large scale deficiencies [2].

What's really dizzying, though, is that this information isn't widely known, and is typically found through either self-directed study or through listening to podcasts. When the average person makes decisions regarding their nutrition, they're relying on outdated and probably harmful advice, despite intending to make "healthy" choices. Maybe we need an app to scan a barcode or read a list of ingredients and respond with the known potential for harm and confidence. All I know is I'll never look at fried chicken the same way again (unless it's fried in lard, of course).

[0] https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/the-chicken-of... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190303234503id_/http://pdfs.se... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11104-013-1781-2

And in parts of West Africa, palm oil is the principal oil used in many recipes. Before Western vegetable oils were introduced to that part of the world, palm oil was the number one oil used in cooking, followed by groundnut (peanut) oil. A place like that would be the ideal place to study the effects of palm oil.