Coconut Oil: Diet Friend or Foe?

Tropical Oils’ Bad Reputation and Startling Health Benefits

© Victoria Anisman-Reiner

Coconut tree / Palm tree / Coconut oil, kahanaboy at www.morguefile.com

Despite the fears of our parents' generation, health experts are now suggesting coconut as one of the healthiest oils: good for the heart, thyroid, cholesterol and more.

Occasionally, medical science gets it wrong. The blacklisting of coconut and other tropical oils by American health and nutrition experts stands as a perfect example. Thirty years of health advice by the FDA and other experts has promoted trans fat margarine or corn, soy, safflower and canola oil over coconut oil, but the joke is on us. It turns out that coconut oil may be beneficial to the immune system, the thyroid, the heart, improves cholesterol, and unlike most fats, coconut oil does not go rancid even when cooked at high temperatures.

The Benefits of Coconut Oil:

Immune Support

Metabolism and Thyroid

Blood Sugar

Cholesterol

No Rancidity

Raw Food Diets

Coconut’s Undeserved Bad Reputation: Where did it come from?

According to Dr. Mary G. Enig (2001), “The coconut industry has suffered more than three decades of abusive rhetoric from the consumer activist group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), from the American Soybean Association (ASA) and other members of the edible oil industry, and from those who learned their misinformation from groups like CSPI and ASA.”

It all began in the late 1950s with the misinterpretation of several studies showing the health impact of polyunsaturated and saturated fats (Enig, 2001). These studies were used by various groups, including the CSPI and the FDA, to make a case that partially hydrogenated (trans) oils were the healthy ones, while coconut and palm oil were called “cheaper artery-clogging oils from Malaysia and Indonesia.”

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, several American health boards (some of which had originally been in favor of the more stable saturated fats over unstable unsaturated and trans fat) began to use the same misinformation to promote domestic corn, soy, and other oils over foreign coconut, palm and palm kernel oils, under the guise of sage health advice.

For more details, see Dr. Enig’s article, Coconut: In Support of Good Health in the 21st Century.


The copyright of the article Coconut Oil: Diet Friend or Foe? in Holistic Nutrition is owned by Victoria Anisman-Reiner. Permission to republish Coconut Oil: Diet Friend or Foe? must be granted by the author in writing.




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