In June of 2017 the American Heart Association published
what they call - A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association
Regarding Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease. In this report
that month they stated unequivocally they do not recommend coconut oil.
This was just the latest in a long - multiple decades-long battle around
coconut .I've had my own battles personally about coconut oil. I
I loved coconut when I was a kid. My mom and my grandmother (who I grew up with)
- both knew that my favorite birthday dessert was coconut - coconut pie, coconut
cake ... Yes. we had too much of a culture around desserts! That's a different
story for a different time. However the scientific community has been battling
over coconut oil for a long time as well. When I grew up, became a physician and
then started teaching prevention, I found out that coconut oil was saturated.
Saturated oils were supposed to be bad. I stopped taking coconut oil &
had it very, very rarely. Now here's an interesting twist. Though
this is this was some of the argument and criticism of the American Heart
Association advice - that you would expect to see. I saw this as I was looking at
doing research for this video and I thought, " oh boy -
here comes another emotional - more heat than light - anger around this issue..." but
boy was I surprised. This blogger won me over. Her name is Hilda Bastian.
She does do public citizen's research in Australia. She's done it here in the US.
She's been a an epidemiologist for the National Institute of Health. And
actually it's some fairly high level (work she's done). She's actually been a founding member of
the Cochrane Association. That's sort of like the National . - I mean the global -
Wikipedia for science. This is part of the PLoS Public Library of Science. It's
frustrating (dealing with issues like coconut oil). I think as an epidemiologist (she's a
comedian about epidemiology as well) and I think she's she tends to deal with a
lot of the issues that are that we're dealing with- like coconut oil for
example. ABSOLUTELY MAYBE. now What she criticized the American Heart
Association for was : number 1: bias - there were financial ties in that
organization. They devoted a page (a whole page!) to their financial biases. But that wasn't
all. There was a selection of studies - there was no list of the studies that
they looked at! #2 - the second one was applying different criteria to different studies
So again this lady's an excellent epidemiologist. I actually trust some of her
review of the AHA's work more than the AHA's board.
But let's go on and look at some different issues around coconut oil.
Who's right? Here's the Center for Science in the Public Interest -
the public interest group. You would think, " well maybe they're going to not
have any political ties. " Wrong!. It's been around for a couple of decade.
They've been embroiled -they spend their life embroiled in political battles. Now
their perspective is there are a lot of myths that persist about coconut
oil - like "the myth" that you can lose weight, that it helps you lose weight. Well again I mean
that may be a little bit harsh it does help you lose weight if it helps you to
decrease caloric intake. Maybe compared to some diets. It also
depends on how much coconut oil. Myth number 2: coconut oil is good for the
heart and myth number 3: cooking with it all protects you from dementia. I
would agree that there is - a point behind those statements being myths. I don't
think - the jury's still out - though I do think that there's still arguable points
about this. This is a meta-analysis from the
British Medical Journal. It's Open Heart - which is the open source web version of
the British Medical Journal section concentrating on cardiovascular disease.
They had several points here. They're looking at MCTs - the medium chain
fatty acids or triglycerides. They're saying that they do seem to help
compared to the long chains. However they're also saying - look - they may have
limited help - limited pathogenicity (danger) but also limited help.
They said, " You know what- you can use these but it's not going to be a
super-duper cure. "This is a very interesting article to me. If you're
a vegan. Maybe even if your own
animal eater, you may want to shut your ears for this part..
This is where they're doing some ..the authors of this study are - this is
the Asian Australian (Australasian) Journal of Animal
Science. They're talking about carcass composition and serum lipid in
male broilers (in other words chickens) they're growing
to take to market. The point here was they said, "Yes. What you do need - if
you have too much soybean oil in the diet of these chickens,
they'll have too much fat in their body. You want to decrease the soybean oil by
75% with coconut oil. I mean if these guys are doing that to decrease body fat
content in broilers , it does make you wonder. If you start
studying the coconut oil debate, you'll hear that
CIS fats are good and TRANS fats are bad. What are those? These are the
fatty acids. This is the acid part this is the carbon chain on it. Now sis and
trans fats have a - this is called an unsaturated area. If you have hydrogen
ions on every one of these - then it's a saturated fat. CIS it's supposed to be
good. It creates the kink and makes it
bent -the molecule bent. TRANS - they're saying are bad. So which is coconut oil?
Neither! Again the point is this gets to be a
complicated, detailed argument. I just went through that a minute ago. This is a
saturated fat. This is what coconut oil is. These are CIS - I believe this is
a CIS - oh yes this is a CIS fat. This is a TRANS fat. There's been
arguments long ago that Public Interest Science Group - one of their major battles
was to get regulation to get saturated fats
out of the American diet - Then to get trans fats out of the American dieT.
There's some argument about going back to saturated fats. The difference
here is - there's an acid called lauric acid - it's what's called
a medium chain fatty acid. Let me show you what medium and short chains
are. This is about 17 carbons in the chain. That's a long chain fatty acid.
When you have 12 or more - I think it's like 12 to 8. I'm not sure of the exact number
But those are short chain fatty acids. Just to complete the loop on that if
you hook these three together with a glycerin molecule - you will get a
triglyceride - the blood fats (in a blood "cholesterol" test panel.) You take that glycerin off. You start digesting
this & you get ketosis. (Which diabetics do because they can't burn sugar very
well.)You also want to get ketosis early on in your low-carb diet because you're
not burning sugar. We actually burn - or create ketones every time we burn fat.
Now this is a meta-analyses regarding
coconut oil consumption and cardiovascular risk factors. There were
eight clinical trials &13 observational studies. They did find coconut tends
to increase LDL as well. The coconut Pro Group would say, "Yeah - but it increases
HDL even further."If you look at the actual studies, there's not very
much measurement of the HDL, so that's not well-founded - at least yet.
Here's their suggestion the weight of the evidence
from intervention studies suggest that replacing coconut oil with CIS
unsaturated fats would alter blood lipids in a manner consistent with
reduction in risk factor for cardiovascular disease, So this study was
obviously one that was quoted (this meta-analysis was quoted) by that Center
for Science in the Public Interest - because it's anti coconut oil. The
bottom line is - the results (at least in my mind) are still not that clear
either way. Here's another bottom line. Maybe it doesn't sound right. But why
does it matter? This is this is coconut consumption in
the United States - starting back in 1964 and this is in 2016. So yes there's been
a little bit of increase, but not really a whole lot. Iounds like a storm in a tea
kettle. Thank you.