2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Coconut oil seems to be a magic bullet for weight loss and heart disease prevention, but it's not that simple.
Yelena Motova, a nutritionist and author of the bestselling book My Best Friend is the Stomach, published a new book Food for Joy. Nutritionist Notes”. In it, Elena, from the point of view of evidence-based medicine, examines popular diets and individual foods, as well as vitamins and dietary supplements. Should you avoid gluten and be afraid of palm oil? Is the keto diet good for you? How much water do you need to drink and how to create a healthy diet? These and many other questions will be answered by Food for Joy.
With permission from the author, Lifehacker publishes an excerpt from Chapter 11, Eat Healthy Fat! (But without fanaticism).
The question "what to eat to lose weight" has long been occupied by humanity. And so, in one two-month study with nineteen healthy volunteers divided into two groups, it was shown that when consuming a special blend of triglycerides from coconut oil, participants lost an average of 400 g more weight compared to regular fats. Somehow it does not pull on a revolution in nutrition, given the small number of participants, the short observation time, and also very modest results. However, it was enough to skyrocket sales of coconut oil as a magic weight loss agent. The very word "coconut" in the name of everything edible and inedible now carries healing power. Open any site that starts with "ah" and ends with "herb" and see for yourself.
As I mentioned earlier, saturated fatty acids with different carbon chain lengths can affect blood lipids and other metabolic parameters in different ways. Medium chain triglycerides contain 8 or 10 carbon atoms. As with the adapted formula, they can be extracted from coconut oil or palm kernel oil (it is made from seeds, not from the pulp of oil palm fruit and is close to coconut in saturated fat).
Even if there are some beneficial effects in the study described above (for me, given its quality, this is not obvious), then they are not related to coconut oil as such. Coconut oil contains only 16% medium chain triglycerides, not 100% as in the studied mixtures. Half of coconut oil is composed of lauric fatty acid, the rest is mainly myristic and palmitic acids (12, 14 and 16 carbon atoms, respectively). These are all long-chain saturated fatty acids that tend to raise total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol in the blood.
The problem is, we don't have good research yet to show how coconut oil affects health.
Data from eight clinical trials lasting 5–8 weeks with 9 to 83 participants are clearly not enough for this, but even in these trials they did not find any encouraging results. Coconut oil raises total cholesterol, HDL, and LDL levels more than unsaturated fats. It affects atherogenic blood lipid fractions in much the same way as other saturated fats, such as beef tallow or palm oil.
Lovers of all natural love to refer to the Aboriginal people of Polynesia, who eat almost exclusively coconuts and have a low rate of cardiovascular disease. However, other aspects of the diet and lifestyle of these people are so different from ours that the theory of coconuts as the only explanation for their well-being seems far-fetched.
Coconut oil in the modern world is fully a product of industrial processing. It can be obtained in a variety of ways, which determines its properties and possible health benefits or harms. The problem is that it’s impossible to tell from the label exactly how the oil was obtained, because the terms Virgin and Extra Virgin in relation to coconut oil are not regulated by law. Coconut oil can be refined and even partially hydrogenated for longer storage.
Furious Chef Anthony Warner writes in his book that a casserole in coconut oil tastes slightly shampoo for him. I have never tried it, I can not say anything. Considering that there are a huge number of traditional dishes with coconut milk (I usually cook soups and curries with it), it is not clear why buy refined coconut oil and fry cheese cakes on it.
The official dietary guidelines for coconut oil are the same as for all saturated fats. It is "best used in small amounts as a discontinuous alternative to other oils in baking and cooking in the context of a healthy diet."
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