Palm oil generates an incredible amount of pollution in Internet comment sections whenever it is mentioned, because people don't realize that it's simply the most productive oil per unit acre by far. If not for Indonesian rainforest palm oil you'd need to cut down 2-3x as much Brazilian rainforest for soybeans or Phillippine rainforest for coconuts to meet the same demand. 71% of palm oil is consumed between the Caspian Sea and the Pacific. Approximately one-third is used for nonfood applications, particularly the Indonesian biodiesel industry, which if you wanted to do something about deforestation, you could pay them to stop doing that in particular.
No, palm oil is terrible and everywhere in ultra processed food because it's extremely cheap.
There are few healthy vegetable oils and they tend to be very expensive: olive, macadamia, coconut, etc.
EDIT: I stand corrected, it has moderate amounts of PUFA, but terrible Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio (45/1), which is thought to have metabolic consequences.
My understanding has been that it's cheap, saturated, and solid/stable, so it's a straightforward replacement for the hydrogenated oils that were previously being used in many of the same applications before the whole trans fat issue banished them.
The main problem with palm oil isn’t health afaik, it’s the orangutan habitat destruction since most palm oil still comes from wild forests instead of farming.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/palm-oil...
It is a saturated fat, but it's being mixed with highly unsaturated peanut oil, so the whole-product average is probably insignificant.