Update on Coconut Oil

25 Apr Update on Coconut Oil

Once bad news, overnight coconut oil became the new black dress of cooking, a miracle food with sweeping health benefits. In fact, one of my yoga students has a spouse with Alzheimer’s. She believes substituting coconut oil for other oils in her cooking has stemmed the awful tide of the disease. Is there hardcore scientific evidence for support her observation? The following article by Meredith Melnick from HuffPost Healthy Living should help answer the question.

So … is coconut oil actually healthy or just a passing health fad? And, if it is healthy, why did we used to think it was so bad for us?

Coconut oil is everywhere these days — as a butter substitute in vegan baking, a smoothie topper for natural health nuts and even a beauty treatment, for moisturizing skin and hair and improving oral health via oil pulling.

But … wasn’t it just a generation ago that we were decrying coconut oil as the worst of the worst, due to its high levels of heart-harming saturated fat? Did we get it very wrong back then or is the reemergence of the tropical oil nothing but a slick stunt?

According to Tom Brenna, a professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, the answer is some combination of both. Not all coconut oils are created equal. The flaky, fragrant stuff you might find in a superfood smoothie is a very different type of coconut oil than the partially-hydrogenated fat found in junk food in the ’80s, which was a highly-processed version of the plant oil, containing trans fats and other dangerous, cholesterol-promoting compounds.

“The older refined-deodorized bleached coconut oil causes rapid and very unhealthy looking rises in cholesterol, for sure, no doubt,” Brenna said in an email to HuffPost Healthy Living. “There is no evidence that that is the case for virgin coconut oil, which is available today but was not in the 1970s and ’80s when people were using RDB coconut oil.”

Virgin coconut oil and even a refined version (most studies have been conducted on refined coconut oil) are now available in grocery stores and health stores and are being touted for their ability to help us lose weight, stave off illness and even prevent Alzheimer’s. Sure, it’s better than its junk food predecessor, but is it quite all that? …