"What About Coconuts, Coconut Milk, and Coconut Oil MCTs?"
Studies of populations who eat a lot of coconuts
are frequently cited by those who sell coconut oil as evidence
that it does not have harmful effects.
For example, there was an apparent absence of stroke and heart disease
on the island of Kitava. What were they eating?
Well, their diets centered around tubers, like sweet potatoes,
with fruits, greens, nuts, corn and beans.
Yes, they ate fish a few times a week,
but they were eating largely whole food plant-based diets.
So no wonder they may have had such low rates of artery disease,
and one of those whole foods was coconut, not coconut oil.
Now, if you go to Pukapuka, they eat even more coconuts,
and there's even an island where that's most of what they eat,
and they get high cholesterol.
What's a population eating 87% plant-based—
red meat, chicken, and eggs only eaten seldomly, no dairy—
doing with cholesterol levels over 200?
Well, they're eating all these coconuts every day.
What are their disease rates like? We don't know.
There's no clinical surveys, no epidemiological data, no autopsies.
They did do some EKGs, which can sometimes pick up
evidence of past heart attacks and found few abnormalities,
but the sample was too small to be a definitive study.
And even if they did have low disease rates,
they weren't eating coconut oil, they were eating coconuts.
Coconut oil proponents pointing to these studies
is like the high fructose corn syrup lobby pointing to studies
of healthy populations who eat corn-on-the-cob,
or the sugar industry pointing to studies on fruit consumption
and saying, see, eat all the refined sugar you want.
But fruit has fiber and so do coconuts.
Just like adding psyllium fiber (Metamucil)
to coconut oil can help blunt the adverse effects on cholesterol,
fiber derived from defatted coconut itself
can reduce cholesterol levels as much as oat bran.
And the plant protein in coconut—also missing from the oil—may also help
explain why whole coconut may not have the same effects on cholesterol.
Although coconut fat in the form of powdered coconut milk
may not have the same effects on cholesterol as coconut oil,
frequent consumption, defined as 3 or more times a week, has been
associated with increased risk of vascular disease, stroke, and heart attack.
And no wonder, as coconut milk may acutely impair artery function,
as badly as a sausage and egg McMuffin.
They tested three different meals: a Western high fat meal,
comprised of an egg McMuffin, sausage McMuffin, and two hash browns,
versus a local high-fat meal
(this was done in Singapore, so the more traditional high fat meal was rice
cooked with coconut milk, though, there were also anchovies and an egg),
versus the same amount of calories in an unhealthy low fat meal,
comprised of Frosted Flakes, skim milk and juice.
Here's the artery function, the ability of the arteries to relax normally,
before Mickey-D's and after, significantly crippling down artery function
within hours of consumption, and the same thing with the coconut milk.
So whether mostly meat and oil fat, or coconut milk fat,
the arteries similarly clamped down,
whereas that horrible sugary breakfast had no bad effect on artery function,
because, as terrible as it was, it had no saturated fat at all,
though it also didn't have any egg, which may have also helped.
Coconut oil proponents also try to argue that coconut oil
has MCTs, medium chain triglycerides, shorter chain saturated fats
that aren't as bad as the longer chain saturated fats in meat and dairy,
but you can't apply the MCT research to coconut oil. Why?
MCT oil is composed of MCTs, the medium chain fats,
caprylic and capric acid, about 50% of each,
whereas those MCTs make up only like 10% of the coconut oil.
Most of coconut oil is
the cholesterol-raising longer chain saturated fats, lauric and myristic.
It is, therefore, inaccurate to consider coconut oil to contain predominantly
MCTs, so you can't extrapolate from MCT studies to coconut oil.
That's actually quite a common misconception,
that the saturated fat in coconut oil is mainly MCTs.
Actually coconut oil is mainly lauric and myristic,
which have potent LDL, bad cholesterol, raising effects.
Coconut oil should, therefore, not be advised for people
who should or want to reduce their risk of the #1 killer
of U.S. men and women: heart disease.
It's like how the beef industry loves to argue that beef fat contains stearic acid,
a type of saturated fat that doesn't raise cholesterol.
Yeah, but it also has palmitic and myristic
that, like lauric, does raise cholesterol.
If you compare the effects of different saturated fats,
yes, stearic has a neutral effect on LDL,
but palmitic, myristic, and lauric shoot it up.
And frankly so may MCT oil itself,
bumping up LDL like 15% compared to control.
So this popular belief spread by the coconut oil industry
that coconut oil is healthy, is not supported by science.
So basically coconut oil should be treated no differently
than animal sources of dietary saturated fat.
The latest review, published in March 2017
in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, put it even more simply
in their recommendations for patients: "Avoid."