September 26, 2008
DR Bruce Fife
Protect your heart with coconut oil? Yes, believe it or not, coconut oil may be one of the best foods for your heart.
Once mistakenly believed to be bad for the heart because of its saturated fat content, coconut oil is now known to contain a unique form of saturated fat that actually helps prevent heart disease, stroke, and hardening of the arteries as well as provide many other health benefits.
Asian and Polynesian people who rely on coconut and coconut oil as a major part of their daily diet have the lowest heart disease rates in the world. Some of these people get as much as 50 percent of their total daily calories as saturated fat, primarily from coconut oil. If coconut oil caused heart disease, as some people used to believe, these islanders would have all died off centuries ago. Those populations who consume large quantities of coconut oil have remarkably good cardiovascular health. Absent are the heart attacks and strokes characteristic in Western countries where coconut oil is rarely used.
What many people don´t realize is that there are different types of saturated fat, just as there are different types of polyunsaturated fat. Each has a different effect on the body. The saturated fat in coconut oil is unlike the fat found in meat or even other vegetable fats. It is identical to a special group of fats found in human breast milk called medium-chain triglycerides (MCT). These special fat molecules have been shown to stimulate the metabolism, improve digestion, strengthen the immune system, and protect against bacterial, viral, and fungal infections as well as protect the heart and arteries from the conditions that cause heart disease.
One of the major differences between MCT and other fats is the way in which they are digested and metabolized. Most all fats in our diet whether they are saturated or unsaturated are in the form of large molecules called long-chain triglycerides (LCT). Both vegetable oils and animal fats are composed almost entirely of LCT. The MCT in coconut oil and human breast milk are much smaller in size. The size makes a big difference.
The large LCT are digested slowly. As they are absorbed through the intestinal wall they are combined into bundles of fat and protein called lipoproteins. These lipoproteins are sent into the bloodstream to be distributed throughout the body. These are the fats that end up on artery walls and fill up fat cells.
MCT, on the other hand, are so small that they don't need pancreatic enzymes for digestion and are quickly absorbed and channeled directly to the liver rather than the bloodstream. In the liver they are used as fuel to produce energy. Therefore, they do not circulate in the bloodstream to the degree that other fats do. Consequently, they don't collect on artery walls or contribute to hardening of the arteries and don't collect in fat cells or contribute to weight gain. They are used to produce energy not arterial plaque and not body fat.
Being a saturated fat, the primary concern most people have about coconut oil is its effect on blood cholesterol levels. Studies, however, have shown that it does not have a harmful effect, but improves cholesterol levels.
When people add coconut oil into their diets their total blood cholesterol levels may fluctuate either up or down slightly, but in either case their HDL (good) cholesterol increases. HDL cholesterol is believed to protect against heart disease and the higher it is the better. Total cholesterol is not a very accurate measure of heart disease risk because it includes both LDL (bad) cholesterol and HDL (good) cholesterol. You don´t know how much of the good or the bad makes up the total. This is why nearly half of those people who die of heart attacks have normal or below normal total cholesterol levels. So, total cholesterol is pretty much meaningless. A much more accurate indicator of heart disease risk is the cholesterol ratio (total-C/HDL-C). The cholesterol ratio takes into account the amount of good cholesterol in the total cholesterol value. This has proven to be a far more accurate measurement of heart disease risk.
Researchers consider a cholesterol ratio of 5.0 to be normal or average. A ratio above 5.0 indicates an increased risk of heart disease. Below 5.0 represents a reduced risk and 3.2 or lower is optimal or very low risk.
There is a lot of confusion about cholesterol values and their meaning. Let´s look at an example. A total blood cholesterol level of 200 mg/dl is considered to be average. If a person has a total cholesterol value of 180 mg/dl this would be considered low risk. But if their HDL (good) cholesterol were only 32 mg/dl, the cholesterol ratio would be 5.6, which indicates high risk. Although total cholesterol of 180 mg/dl indicates low risk, the cholesterol ratio of 5.6 indicates high risk. So in this example total cholesterol is not accurate.
Here is another example. Let´s say a person has total cholesterol of 240 mg/dl. This is considered high risk. However, if his HDL is 75 mg/dl, his cholesterol ratio would be 3.2, which is in the very low risk or optimal range. Here again the total cholesterol level gives an erroneous indication of heart disease risk.
Sometimes those people with high total cholesterol also have a high cholesterol ratio and those with low total cholesterol have a low cholesterol ratio. My point here is that total cholesterol does not always correlate with the cholesterol ratio. If you only look at total cholesterol values, as most people do, you could come to the wrong conclusion as regards to the person´s true risk of heart disease.
There have been numerous studies that have compared cholesterol values after subjects consumed coconut oil, corn oil, soybean oil, and other vegetable oils. It has been found that vegetable oils reduce total cholesterol more than coconut oil. Many people have interpreted this to mean that vegetable oils protect against heart disease while coconut oil doesn´t. However, even though the vegetable oils decrease total cholesterol more than coconut oil, coconut oil improves the cholesterol ratio more than the other oils. Therefore, coconut oil has a more favorable overall effect on cholesterol values than all other vegetable oils.
An interesting study was done by Mendis and colleagues on Sri Lankan male volunteers. Coconut oil is commonly used throughout Sri Lanka. Cholesterol levels were measured in subjects whose normal diet included coconut oil. Subjects were given corn oil, a polyunsaturated vegetable oil, to replace the coconut oil in their diets. Cholesterol levels were again measured. When subjects switched from using coconut oil to corn oil their total blood cholesterol on average decreased from 179.6 to 146.0 mg/dl. LDL (bad) cholesterol decreased from 131.6 to 100.3mg/dl. Both of these changes are considered good, and if taken by themselves, would suggest that corn oil is superior to coconut oil as far as heart health is concerned. However, when you include the HDL (good) cholesterol values, the pictures changes entirely. The HDL cholesterol in volunteers decreased from 43.4 to 25.4mg/dl, which is not good. The cholesterol ratio increased from 4.14 to 5.75, which definitely is not good. Keep in mind, that a ratio greater than 5.0 is considered high risk. When volunteers ate coconut oil they were at a low risk value of 4.14. When they switched to corn oil they were propelled into the high-risk range at 5.75. Even though coconut oil increased total cholesterol relative to corn oil, it lowered the cholesterol ratio and thus reduced the risk of heart disease. According to this study, coconut oil protects against heart disease while corn oil (a polyunsaturated fat) promotes it.
Actually, if you used a little common sense, you can see the fallacy behind the idea that coconut oil is unhealthy. If coconut oil really did cause or even contributed to heart disease it would be very easy to prove. How? All you would have to do is go to the coconut growing regions of the world and examine the health of the people there. If coconut oil caused heart disease, these people should be riddled with heart attacks and strokes. But when you go to Thailand, the Philippines, and the island of the Pacific what do you find? You find that heart disease is relatively low compared to the rest of the world. In fact, the people who eat the most coconut oil have the lowest heart disease rates in the world! This is a fact.
In Sri Lanka, coconut has been the primary source of dietary fat for thousands of years. In 1978 every man, woman, and child consumed the equivalent to 120 coconuts per year. That´s a lot of coconut and a lot of coconut oil. At that time the country had one of the lowest heart disease rates in the world. Only 1 out of every 100,000 deaths was attributed to heart disease. By comparison, in the United States where very little coconut is eaten and people rely more on polyunsaturated oils, the heart disease death rate is over 800 times higher!
Due to warnings to reduce saturated fat consumption, since 1978 coconut consumption in Sri Lanka has declined dramatically. In place of coconut oil the people have begun to eat more corn and other polyunsaturated vegetable oils. As a consequence, an interesting thing has happened. As coconut consumption has decreased, heart disease rates have increased! If coconut oil really did caused heart disease then heart disease rates should have decreased as people consumed less coconut oil, but just the opposite has happened. Replacing coconut oil with polyunsaturated vegetable oil increased heart disease rates.
Another interesting fact is that heart disease occurs almost entirely in the urban population that eats the least amount of coconut oil and the most imported polyunsaturated oil. In populations that live outside of the cities and continue to depend on coconut oil as their major source of dietary fat, heart disease is essentially nonexistent. That´s what the studies show. When people eat coconut oil in place of other oils, heart disease is rare.
In the coconut growing regions of India, people were told to stop eating coconut oil because it contained saturated fat. So they started eating more processed vegetable oils and margarine. As a result, within just 10 years the heart disease rate tripled! In those areas of the world where people eat lots of coconut oil, heart disease is relatively rare. Where people eat very little coconut oil and depend on processed vegetable oils and margarine, like the United States, heart disease is a major health problem.
In areas of the world like the Philippines and Fiji where people have been eating coconuts for thousands of years there has not been a single case of heart disease ever reported until the mid 20th century. Then suddenly people started dying from heart disease, assumedly because they ate coconut oil. Doesn´t that sound strange? Why would coconut oil be harmless for thousands of years and then suddenly become deadly? It makes no sense. Heart disease did not exist in these areas until after processed vegetable oils were introduced and people switched from coconut oil to these imported oils.
For example, in Papua New Guinea coconut has traditionally been the primary source of fat in the diet. People have been eating coconut oil for thousands of years, yet the very first heart attack death didn´t occur until 1964. Heart disease only appeared after they started importing and eating processed vegetable oils. Just like in Sri Lanka and in India, when you go outside the cities into rural populations that still rely on coconut oil as their primary source of fat, heart disease does not exist. In these populations signs of heart disease are completely absent even in the oldest who live to be near 100 years of age. They do not have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, or any other signs of heart disease. These individuals have been consuming coconuts and coconut oil every single day of their lives for nearly 100 years without any ill effect.
When you examine all the evidence, it becomes obvious that coconut oil does not cause or contribute to heart disease in any way. If anything, it helps protect against it. Replacing other fats in your diet with coconut oil is a smart dietary decision.
Bruce Fife, ND is a certified nutritionist and naturopathic physician. He is the author of over 20 books including The Coconut Oil Miracle and Coconut Cures. He serves as the director of the Coconut Research Center, www.coconutresearchcenter.org. His books are available www.piccadillybooks.com.
Once mistakenly believed to be bad for the heart because of its saturated fat content, coconut oil is now known to contain a unique form of saturated fat that actually helps prevent heart disease, stroke, and hardening of the arteries as well as provide many other health benefits.
Asian and Polynesian people who rely on coconut and coconut oil as a major part of their daily diet have the lowest heart disease rates in the world. Some of these people get as much as 50 percent of their total daily calories as saturated fat, primarily from coconut oil. If coconut oil caused heart disease, as some people used to believe, these islanders would have all died off centuries ago. Those populations who consume large quantities of coconut oil have remarkably good cardiovascular health. Absent are the heart attacks and strokes characteristic in Western countries where coconut oil is rarely used.
What many people don´t realize is that there are different types of saturated fat, just as there are different types of polyunsaturated fat. Each has a different effect on the body. The saturated fat in coconut oil is unlike the fat found in meat or even other vegetable fats. It is identical to a special group of fats found in human breast milk called medium-chain triglycerides (MCT). These special fat molecules have been shown to stimulate the metabolism, improve digestion, strengthen the immune system, and protect against bacterial, viral, and fungal infections as well as protect the heart and arteries from the conditions that cause heart disease.
One of the major differences between MCT and other fats is the way in which they are digested and metabolized. Most all fats in our diet whether they are saturated or unsaturated are in the form of large molecules called long-chain triglycerides (LCT). Both vegetable oils and animal fats are composed almost entirely of LCT. The MCT in coconut oil and human breast milk are much smaller in size. The size makes a big difference.
The large LCT are digested slowly. As they are absorbed through the intestinal wall they are combined into bundles of fat and protein called lipoproteins. These lipoproteins are sent into the bloodstream to be distributed throughout the body. These are the fats that end up on artery walls and fill up fat cells.
MCT, on the other hand, are so small that they don't need pancreatic enzymes for digestion and are quickly absorbed and channeled directly to the liver rather than the bloodstream. In the liver they are used as fuel to produce energy. Therefore, they do not circulate in the bloodstream to the degree that other fats do. Consequently, they don't collect on artery walls or contribute to hardening of the arteries and don't collect in fat cells or contribute to weight gain. They are used to produce energy not arterial plaque and not body fat.
Being a saturated fat, the primary concern most people have about coconut oil is its effect on blood cholesterol levels. Studies, however, have shown that it does not have a harmful effect, but improves cholesterol levels.
When people add coconut oil into their diets their total blood cholesterol levels may fluctuate either up or down slightly, but in either case their HDL (good) cholesterol increases. HDL cholesterol is believed to protect against heart disease and the higher it is the better. Total cholesterol is not a very accurate measure of heart disease risk because it includes both LDL (bad) cholesterol and HDL (good) cholesterol. You don´t know how much of the good or the bad makes up the total. This is why nearly half of those people who die of heart attacks have normal or below normal total cholesterol levels. So, total cholesterol is pretty much meaningless. A much more accurate indicator of heart disease risk is the cholesterol ratio (total-C/HDL-C). The cholesterol ratio takes into account the amount of good cholesterol in the total cholesterol value. This has proven to be a far more accurate measurement of heart disease risk.
Researchers consider a cholesterol ratio of 5.0 to be normal or average. A ratio above 5.0 indicates an increased risk of heart disease. Below 5.0 represents a reduced risk and 3.2 or lower is optimal or very low risk.
There is a lot of confusion about cholesterol values and their meaning. Let´s look at an example. A total blood cholesterol level of 200 mg/dl is considered to be average. If a person has a total cholesterol value of 180 mg/dl this would be considered low risk. But if their HDL (good) cholesterol were only 32 mg/dl, the cholesterol ratio would be 5.6, which indicates high risk. Although total cholesterol of 180 mg/dl indicates low risk, the cholesterol ratio of 5.6 indicates high risk. So in this example total cholesterol is not accurate.
Here is another example. Let´s say a person has total cholesterol of 240 mg/dl. This is considered high risk. However, if his HDL is 75 mg/dl, his cholesterol ratio would be 3.2, which is in the very low risk or optimal range. Here again the total cholesterol level gives an erroneous indication of heart disease risk.
Sometimes those people with high total cholesterol also have a high cholesterol ratio and those with low total cholesterol have a low cholesterol ratio. My point here is that total cholesterol does not always correlate with the cholesterol ratio. If you only look at total cholesterol values, as most people do, you could come to the wrong conclusion as regards to the person´s true risk of heart disease.
There have been numerous studies that have compared cholesterol values after subjects consumed coconut oil, corn oil, soybean oil, and other vegetable oils. It has been found that vegetable oils reduce total cholesterol more than coconut oil. Many people have interpreted this to mean that vegetable oils protect against heart disease while coconut oil doesn´t. However, even though the vegetable oils decrease total cholesterol more than coconut oil, coconut oil improves the cholesterol ratio more than the other oils. Therefore, coconut oil has a more favorable overall effect on cholesterol values than all other vegetable oils.
An interesting study was done by Mendis and colleagues on Sri Lankan male volunteers. Coconut oil is commonly used throughout Sri Lanka. Cholesterol levels were measured in subjects whose normal diet included coconut oil. Subjects were given corn oil, a polyunsaturated vegetable oil, to replace the coconut oil in their diets. Cholesterol levels were again measured. When subjects switched from using coconut oil to corn oil their total blood cholesterol on average decreased from 179.6 to 146.0 mg/dl. LDL (bad) cholesterol decreased from 131.6 to 100.3mg/dl. Both of these changes are considered good, and if taken by themselves, would suggest that corn oil is superior to coconut oil as far as heart health is concerned. However, when you include the HDL (good) cholesterol values, the pictures changes entirely. The HDL cholesterol in volunteers decreased from 43.4 to 25.4mg/dl, which is not good. The cholesterol ratio increased from 4.14 to 5.75, which definitely is not good. Keep in mind, that a ratio greater than 5.0 is considered high risk. When volunteers ate coconut oil they were at a low risk value of 4.14. When they switched to corn oil they were propelled into the high-risk range at 5.75. Even though coconut oil increased total cholesterol relative to corn oil, it lowered the cholesterol ratio and thus reduced the risk of heart disease. According to this study, coconut oil protects against heart disease while corn oil (a polyunsaturated fat) promotes it.
Actually, if you used a little common sense, you can see the fallacy behind the idea that coconut oil is unhealthy. If coconut oil really did cause or even contributed to heart disease it would be very easy to prove. How? All you would have to do is go to the coconut growing regions of the world and examine the health of the people there. If coconut oil caused heart disease, these people should be riddled with heart attacks and strokes. But when you go to Thailand, the Philippines, and the island of the Pacific what do you find? You find that heart disease is relatively low compared to the rest of the world. In fact, the people who eat the most coconut oil have the lowest heart disease rates in the world! This is a fact.
In Sri Lanka, coconut has been the primary source of dietary fat for thousands of years. In 1978 every man, woman, and child consumed the equivalent to 120 coconuts per year. That´s a lot of coconut and a lot of coconut oil. At that time the country had one of the lowest heart disease rates in the world. Only 1 out of every 100,000 deaths was attributed to heart disease. By comparison, in the United States where very little coconut is eaten and people rely more on polyunsaturated oils, the heart disease death rate is over 800 times higher!
Due to warnings to reduce saturated fat consumption, since 1978 coconut consumption in Sri Lanka has declined dramatically. In place of coconut oil the people have begun to eat more corn and other polyunsaturated vegetable oils. As a consequence, an interesting thing has happened. As coconut consumption has decreased, heart disease rates have increased! If coconut oil really did caused heart disease then heart disease rates should have decreased as people consumed less coconut oil, but just the opposite has happened. Replacing coconut oil with polyunsaturated vegetable oil increased heart disease rates.
Another interesting fact is that heart disease occurs almost entirely in the urban population that eats the least amount of coconut oil and the most imported polyunsaturated oil. In populations that live outside of the cities and continue to depend on coconut oil as their major source of dietary fat, heart disease is essentially nonexistent. That´s what the studies show. When people eat coconut oil in place of other oils, heart disease is rare.
In the coconut growing regions of India, people were told to stop eating coconut oil because it contained saturated fat. So they started eating more processed vegetable oils and margarine. As a result, within just 10 years the heart disease rate tripled! In those areas of the world where people eat lots of coconut oil, heart disease is relatively rare. Where people eat very little coconut oil and depend on processed vegetable oils and margarine, like the United States, heart disease is a major health problem.
In areas of the world like the Philippines and Fiji where people have been eating coconuts for thousands of years there has not been a single case of heart disease ever reported until the mid 20th century. Then suddenly people started dying from heart disease, assumedly because they ate coconut oil. Doesn´t that sound strange? Why would coconut oil be harmless for thousands of years and then suddenly become deadly? It makes no sense. Heart disease did not exist in these areas until after processed vegetable oils were introduced and people switched from coconut oil to these imported oils.
For example, in Papua New Guinea coconut has traditionally been the primary source of fat in the diet. People have been eating coconut oil for thousands of years, yet the very first heart attack death didn´t occur until 1964. Heart disease only appeared after they started importing and eating processed vegetable oils. Just like in Sri Lanka and in India, when you go outside the cities into rural populations that still rely on coconut oil as their primary source of fat, heart disease does not exist. In these populations signs of heart disease are completely absent even in the oldest who live to be near 100 years of age. They do not have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, or any other signs of heart disease. These individuals have been consuming coconuts and coconut oil every single day of their lives for nearly 100 years without any ill effect.
When you examine all the evidence, it becomes obvious that coconut oil does not cause or contribute to heart disease in any way. If anything, it helps protect against it. Replacing other fats in your diet with coconut oil is a smart dietary decision.
Bruce Fife, ND is a certified nutritionist and naturopathic physician. He is the author of over 20 books including The Coconut Oil Miracle and Coconut Cures. He serves as the director of the Coconut Research Center, www.coconutresearchcenter.org. His books are available www.piccadillybooks.com.
Source : American Chronicle 27 September 2010
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