A new report suggests that 50 percent of the world isn’t at
a healthy weight, and it may be in large part due to the huge increase in
vegetable oil the world now consumes.
Tim Benton, a professor at the
University of Leeds, told the BBC that while vegetable oil used to be a
rare commodity, soybean and palm oil are now so ubiquitous that they’re
considered two of the main eight food groups (along with wheat, rice, corn,
sugar, barley, and potatoes) that provide 85 percent of the world’s calories.
Over
the past three decades, trade agreements have made vegetable oil cheaper and
easier to produce, export, and import. This has had some positive
externalities, as Benton points out. Namely, it’s helped reduce famine in a big
way, and has allowed the “poorest of poor access to cheap calories.”
