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For centuries, people who live in tropical climates where coconuts grow—anywhere from Jamaica to the Philippines—have been using coconuts for their incredible healing powers. They can protect your skin naturally from too much sun and keep it moisturized… they can condition your hair… and they can even kill off an infestation of lice! From Marco Polo to Sir Francis Drake, going all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and the tales of Arabian nights, we’ve found more and more scientifically-proven uses for this fruit of the palm tree. And while using a coconut to radio your way off a desert island only happens on TV, in reality, it can actually save your life. Now, coconut oil has become a popular health food in America, used for cooking and baking—and found in the pantry as well as the medicine cabinet. And for good reason, too! It’s a good source of medium-chain fatty acids, with about 84 percent of its calories coming from its saturated fat content. That, contrary to what you may have heard, is a good thing. Our bodies need a certain amount of saturated fat. And the medium-chain triglycerides and other components in coconut oil can have a multitude of health benefits. Yet, for some reason, the American Heart Association has waged war on coconut oil as part of its recent report on dietary fats and cardiovascular disease,1 tying it—along with several other saturated fats—to heart disease. Like much that comes out of the mainstream, however, the AHA presents an oversimplified view—with the report’s authors linking saturated fat to increased cholesterol levels and making the giant leap to heart disease. But they ignore all the data that suggests that cholesterol does NOT cause heart disease! Here’s how to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the “official” but utterly nutty guidelines about heart disease—especially as they relate to coconuts and, more importantly, coconut oil.
At first, it sounds simple enough—and it’s something we’ve heard before. The American Heart Association asserts that consuming saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol, which, in turn, causes hardening of the arteries. But it’s just not true! If you actually READ the scientific literature, there’s emerging evidence that saturated fat from food sources is NOT a risk factor for coronary heart disease. In a review of several studies published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, for example, no fewer than THREE cardiologists state that saturated fat does NOT cause arteries to harden.2 And they were certainly not the only scientists to tackle this issue. A 2010 meta-analysis took it one step further: It found NO significant evidence to support the conclusion that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.3 So, while pushing its old agenda with outdated assumptions and dangerous misconceptions, the AHA is missing—or outright IGNORING—the major takeaways from the latest research on the issue. Let me break it down for you and give you the ACTUAL truth, not just some twisted version of it. In reality, LDL is not the villain. It serves several vital functions in your body, such as:
What the AHA should be focusing its energy on is the problem of people not having enough LDL to be considered healthy! In fact, in a large study published in the American Heart Journal, researchers analyzed the data of more than 230,000 people hospitalized with coronary artery disease and found that about 50 percent of these people had LDL levels that were WAY under the “normal” number. Half of these folks with heart disease that was bad enough to land them in the hospital showed LDL levels that were less than 100 mg/dL. 4To put that in context for you, most labs—which set the bar too low as it is, in my opinion—would deem less than 130 mg/dL to be the goal. Yes, the ideal the reference range would be lower if you already have heart disease—or diabetes—but these basement-level numbers are way too low for most folks. But there IS a reason why LDL is considered the “bad” kind of cholesterol—and that’s because of what happens when it becomes damaged. What initiates inflammation and then plaque formation in the arteries isn’t the mere existence of LDL cholesterol… but the oxidation of it. Interestingly, a study published in the American Journal of Cardiology looked at a variety of heart disease risk factors, including the old mainstream medicine favorite, traditional lipid levels (or “total cholesterol”). The study matched 431 healthy men and women without any signs of coronary artery disease (CAD) with 490 men and women of about the same age who did have CAD. It turned out that the easiest way to figure out which of the patients had CAD—or which ones were at a higher risk for it—was to take a look at their oxidized LDL levels. In fact, oxidized LDL was BY FAR a better predictor of heart disease than the standard total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol measurements!5
Coconut oil can even (modestly) reduce your appetite,12,13 increase your metabolism,14,15 and help you lose fat16—especially around your waist and in your belly (where, we’ve found, fat accumulation can be particularly dangerous).17,18 Finally, you may be surprised to know that coconut oil also contains a type of fatty acid called lauric acid, whose antimicrobial activity may help fight off infections!
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t get your cholesterol tested by your doc. By all means, do! You should have a sense of what the numbers on your lipid panel are, but you should also understand that they’re only part of the story. And that means you should also urge your doctor to look for signs of oxidation, so you can do something about it before your arteries harden and cardiovascular disease sets in. In the meantime, you can make some good tweaks to your diet to keep your LDL from becoming oxidized. There are a number of factors that can cause this oxidative damage, including diet, environmental toxins, and medications, as well as other factors. But research has shown that you can decrease your levels of oxidized LDL by taking some or all of the following steps:
And you know what else has been shown by studies to reduce markers of inflammation and oxidative stress? Eating coconut oil!10 As well, a number of small, human studies have shown that coconut oil increases good HDL cholesterol.11 So, I feel pretty confident saying that a daily tablespoon of organic, coconut oil is a healthy food for most people. I should note that the most common form of coconut oil is highly refined and, in some cases, even made from rancid coconut byproducts—so stick with organic, extra virgin versions. A holistic doctor can assess your unique biochemical requirements and advise you further. One of the ways I do this with patients is to test their blood levels of fatty acids to identify any imbalances between their omega-3, omega-6, omega-9, saturated fat, and trans fatty acids levels. And if anything is off-kilter, we can easily address the situation with diet and fatty acid supplements.
With permission from Dr. Mark Stengler's Health Revelations
