Palm oil is popular in Asia for a number of reasons... some of them nutritional

Many hawkers use palm oil for cooking, as seen in this filepic, as it has excellent thermal stability, meaning that it can be safely reused for deep frying many times without losing its nutritional value.

For the health-conscious, fats, particularly in the form of oil, would certainly be one of the first things to be eliminated – as much as possible anyway – from their diet.

Those more aware of the distinctions between the different types of fat might be more discriminatory by ensuring that whatever fats they do consume are of the healthier unsaturated fat, rather than the saturated variety.