Coconut Oil Is Over, RIP Coconut Oil

A couple of week back I saw a socialite come pseudo-nutritionist post a picture of her ‘healthy’ breakfast. It was bacon. Cooked in coconut oil.

Coconut oil in smoothies. Coconut oil in porridge. Coconut oil in your damn coffee. It’s everywhere; it must be healthy, right? (I’m not even going to touch the bacon thing rn).

Whole Foods (who exclusively sell healthy things), reported they sold 6 tonnes of coconut oil in February 2015 alone. Coconut oil evangelists rave that it ‘boosts metabolism’, makes your skin ‘glow’, (presumably in the dark?), is heart healthy, prevents dementia, reduces cholesterol, helps you lose weight, boosts the immune system, cures diabetes, Crohn’s disease and IBS.

Not to be a total downer, but it’s all BS.

This is another example of marketing getting one over on science, and then laughing in its face. Recently, the British Nutrition Foundation published a review of the available evidence around coconut oil, and basically, they’re pissed.

Coconut oil is 99.9% fatty acids. Of those, 92% are saturated fats. Just to put that into perspective - butter is about 60% saturated fat (not that you should be going HAM on butter either). Just in case you forgot, saturated fats are the things that raise your LDL-cholesterol (bad) and raise your risk of heart disease (very bad). Heart disease is the number one killer of human people in the US and number two in the UK. Not cool, you guys.

UK dietary guidelines say you need to keep saturated fats to less than 11% of calories, about 20g for women, and about 30g for men. And just to be clear, that’s the upper limit. And if you still don’t think that dietary saturated fats are linked to heart disease, well then you can get in the bin.

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