Virgin Coconut Oil Benefits
If You Want a Food Loaded with Real Health Benefits
I continually talk about the many toxic effects of the unsaturated oils, and I have frequently said that coconut oil doesn’t have those toxic effects, though it does contain a small amount of the unsaturated oils. But the benefits of Virgin Coconut Oil far outweigh the negative aspects.
(How Coconut Oil Works For Thyroid)
Many people have asked me to write something on coconut oil. I thought I might write a small book on it, but I realize that there are no suitable channels for distributing such a book — if the seed-oil industry can eliminate major corporate food products that have used coconut oil for a hundred years, they certainly have the power to prevent dealers from selling a book that would affect their market more seriously. For the present, I will just outline some of the virtues of coconut oil.
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The unsaturated oils in some cooked foods become rancid in just a few hours, even at refrigerator temperatures, and are responsible for the stale taste of leftover foods. (Eating slightly stale food isn’t particularly harmful, since the same oils, even when eaten absolutely fresh, will oxidize at a much higher rate once they are in the body, where they are heated and thoroughly mixed with an abundance of oxygen.)
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Coconut oil that has been kept at room temperature for a year has been tested for rancidity, and showed no evidence of it.
Since we would expect the small percentage of unsaturated oils naturally contained in coconut oil to become rancid, it seems that the other (saturated) oils have an antioxidative effect:
I suspect that the dilution keeps the unstable unsaturated fat molecules spatially separated from each other, so they can’t interact in the destructive chain reactions that occur in other oils.
To interrupt chain-reactions of oxidation is one of the functions of antioxidants, and it is possible that a sufficient quantity of coconut oil in the body has this function. It is well established that dietary coconut oil reduces our need for vitamin E, but I think its antioxidant role is more general than that, and that it has both direct and indirect antioxidant activities.
Coconut oil is unusually rich in short and medium-chain fatty acids. Shorter chain length allows fatty acids to be metabolized without the use of the carnitine transport system. Mildronate protects cells against stress partly by opposing the action of carnitine, and comparative studies showed that added carnitine had the opposite effect, promoting the oxidation of unsaturated fats during stress, and increasing oxidative damage to cells.
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I suspect that a degree of saturation of the oxidative apparatus by short-chain fatty acids has a similar effect — that is, that these very soluble and mobile short-chain saturated fats have priority for oxidation because they don’t require carnitine transport into the mitochondrion and that this will tend to inhibit oxidation of the unstable, peroxidizable unsaturated fatty acids.
When Albert Schweitzer operated his clinic in tropical Africa, he said it was many years before he saw any cases of cancer, and he believed that the appearance of cancer was caused by the change to the European type of diet. In the l920s, German researchers showed that mice on a fat-free diet were practically free of cancer.
Since then, many studies have demonstrated a very close association between the consumption of unsaturated oils and the incidence of cancer. Heart damage is easily produced in animals by feeding them linoleic acid; this “essential” fatty acid turned out to be the heart toxin in rape-seed oil. The addition of saturated fat to the experimental heart-toxic oil-rich diet protects against the damage to heart cells.
Immunosuppression was observed in patients who were being “nourished” by intravenous emulsions of “essential fatty acids,” and as a result, coconut oil is used as the basis for intravenous fat feeding, except in organ-transplant patients. For those patients, emulsions of unsaturated oils are used specifically for their immunosuppressive effects.
(How Coconut Oil Works For Thyroid)
General aging, and especially aging of the brain, is increasingly seen as being closely associated with lipid peroxidation.
Several years ago, I met an old couple who were only a few years apart in age, but the wife looked many years younger than her doddering old husband. She was from the Philippines, and she remarked that she always had to cook two meals at the same time, because her husband couldn’t adapt to her traditional food. Three times every day, she still prepared her food in coconut oil. Her apparent youth increased my interest in the effects of coconut oil.
In the l960s, Hartroft and Porta gave an elegant argument for decreasing the ratio of unsaturated oil to saturated oil in the diet (and thus in the tissues). They showed that the “age pigment” is produced in proportion to the ratio of oxidants to antioxidants, multiplied by the ratio of unsaturated oils to saturated oils.
More recently, a variety of studies have demonstrated that ultraviolet light induces peroxidation in unsaturated fats, but not saturated fats, and that this occurs in the skin as well as in the lab.
Rabbit experiments and studies of humans showed that the amount of unsaturated oil in the diet strongly affects the rate at which aged, wrinkled skin develops.
The unsaturated fat in the skin is a major target for the aging and carcinogenic effects of ultraviolet light, though not necessarily the only one.
In the l940s, farmers attempted to use cheap coconut oil for fattening their animals, but they found that it made them lean, active, and hungry. For a few years, an antithyroid drug was found to make the livestock get fat while eating less food, but then it was found to be a strong carcinogen, and it also probably produced hypothyroidism in the people who ate the meat.
By the late l940s, it was found that the same antithyroid effect, causing animals to get fat without eating much food, could be achieved by using soybeans and corn as feed.
Later, an animal experiment fed diets that were low or high in total fat, and in different groups, the fat was provided by pure coconut oil, or pure unsaturated oil, or by various mixtures of the two oils. At the end of their lives, the animals’ obesity increased directly in proportion to the ratio of unsaturated oil to coconut oil in their diet and was not related to the total amount of fat they had consumed.
That is, animals that ate just a little pure unsaturated oil were fat, and animals that ate a lot of coconut oil were lean.
G. W. Crile and his wife found that the metabolic rate of people in Yucatan, where coconut is a staple food, averaged 25% higher than that of people in the United States.
In a hot climate, the adaptive tendency is to have a lower metabolic rate, so it is clear that some factor is more than offsetting this expected effect of high environmental temperatures. The people there are lean, and recently it has been observed that the women there have none of the symptoms we commonly associate with menopause.
By l950, then, it was established that unsaturated fats suppress the metabolic rate, apparently creating hypothyroidism.
Over the next few decades, the exact mechanisms of that metabolic damage were studied. Unsaturated fats damage the mitochondria, partly by suppressing the reparatory enzyme, and partly by causing generalized oxidative damage. The more unsaturated the oils are, the more specifically they suppress tissue response to thyroid hormone and the transport of the hormone on the thyroid transport protein.
Plants evolved a variety of toxins designed to protect themselves from “predators,” such as grazing animals. Seeds contain a variety of toxins that seem to be specific for mammalian enzymes, and the seed oils themselves function to block protein digestive enzymes in the stomach.
The thyroid hormone is formed in the gland by the action of a protein digestive enzyme, and the unsaturated oils also inhibit that enzyme. Similar protein digestive enzymes involved in clot removal and immune function appear to be similarly inhibited by these oils.
Just as metabolism is “activated” by the consumption of coconut oil, which prevents the inhibiting effect of unsaturated oils, other inhibited processes, such as clot removal and immune function, will probably tend to be restored by continuing the use of coconut oil.
Brain tissue is very rich in complex forms of fats.
The experiment (around 1978) in which pregnant mice were given diets containing either coconut oil or unsaturated oil showed that brain development was superior in the young mice whose mothers ate coconut oil.
Because coconut oil supports thyroid function, and the thyroid gland governs brain development, including myelination, the result might simply reflect the difference between normal and hypothyroid individuals.
However, in 1980, experimenters demonstrated that young rats fed milk containing soy oil incorporated the oil directly into their brain cells and had structurally abnormal brain cells as a result.
Lipid oxidation occurs during seizures, and antioxidants such as vitamin E have some anti-seizure activity. Currently, lipid oxidation is being found to be involved in the nerve cell degeneration of Alzheimer’s disease.
Various fractions of coconut oil are coming into use as “drugs,” meaning that they are advertised as treatments for diseases. Butyric acid is used to treat cancer, lauric and myristic acids to treat viral infections, and mixtures of medium-chain fats are sold for weight loss.
Purification undoubtedly increases certain effects and results in profitable products, but in the absence of more precise knowledge, I think the whole natural product, used as regular food, is the best way to protect health.
The shorter-chain fatty acids have strong, unpleasant odors; for a couple of days, after I ate a small amount of a medium-chain triglyceride mixture, my skin oil emitted a rank, goaty smell. Some people don’t seem to have that reaction, and the benefits might outweigh the stink, but these things just haven’t been in use long enough to know whether they are safe.
Treating any complex natural product as the drug industry does, as a raw material to be fractionated in the search for “drug” products, is risky, because the relevant knowledge isn’t sought in the search for an association between a single chemical and a single disease.
While the toxic unsaturated paint-stock oils, especially safflower, soy, corn, and linseed (flaxseed) oils, have been sold to the public precisely for their drug effects, all of their claimed benefits were false.
When people become interested in coconut oil as a “health food,” the huge seed-oil industry — operating through their shills — is going to attack it as an “unproven drug.”
The unmodified natural oil is called “76-degree melt,” since that is its natural melting temperature. One bottle from a health food store was labeled “natural coconut oil, 92% unsaturated oil,” and it had the greasy consistency of old lard. I suspect that someone had confused palm oil (or something worse) with coconut oil because it should be about 96% saturated fatty acids.