So I’ve seen jars, jugs and tins of coconut oil appearing on grocery shelves in the last few months, and my impression is shaped by the giant pyramid of 64-ounce jars framing the huckster’s stand at Sam’s Club. I have looked at the jars amid their vague claims of healthiwonder and long list of “benefits” - No Trans Fats! No Botulism! No Industrial Waste! - and come to a complete screeching halt at 12 grams of saturated fat per 14g tablespoon, which AFAICR is the reason tropical oils were booted about ten years ago.
Then today there’s a front-page article on the wonder of cooking with coconut oil that before the break mentions that the book is very light on the science of its claims, but hey, it’s a cookbook and the food is really tasty.
Is there ANY basis for proclaiming coconut oil a superfood/wonderfood and blithely brushing aside the fact that it’s nearly 100% saturated fat?
One thing that I’ve heard is that it is supposed to be helpful for people with dementia/Alzheimer’s. But like other claims of this sort, I take it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
(Anecdotally, my wife has several aunts and uncles on both sides of her family, plus her mother, dealing with various stages of dementia. Some who are taking coconut oil claim to have seen some improvement.)
It tastes good on pancakes, and my girlfriend’s dog loves it - we started putting it in his food and he started eating more. Other than that, I got nothing.
Saturated fats may be going through a bit of a redemption process. It turns out a lot of studies in the past condemning it didn’t make a distinction between saturated fats and trans-fats. (oops) Google search
But really, when do long lists of widely varied health benefits ever pan out. Coconut oil is yummy though.
It’s currently popular for oil pulling. You hold a mouthful for twenty minutes. Hard to multitask, though, while you’re on your side candling your ear or on your back with a crystal on each chakra.
It’s wonderful in the bedroom, if not the kitchen. It’s solid in the jar, but liquefies the instant you rub it between your hands. Marvelously slippery, and if it’s a wonder food…so much the better.
I doubt if it’s really all that much better for you than a lot of other fats. The paleo crowd loves it, but that’s not a very good reason to eat it.
A better question might be whether or not saturated fats are actually any worse for you than vegetable oil. Here’s an interesting article that references the recent study everyone’s talking about.
As Lab deceiver has indicated, if you dismiss the premise of saturated fat being a waste product piped up from hell, the picture changes somewhat. PUFAs are the new enemy, gotta stay abreast of which oils to avoid…
I hate coconut in all it’s forms and lately (like the past 5 or 6 years) I’ve noticed it’s in every damn thing: cookies, crackers, chips, sauces, etc. Oh sure, sometimes they call it palm oil or something but it still has that same annoying taste and it imparts a texture to things that seems unique as well; I can usually tell if palm oil is present by taste. It must be cheap as shit because everyone seems to be using it. I wish they wouldn’t.
Palm oil is used a lot because it is solid at room temperature. All those companies that had to ditch partially hydrogenated oil had to switch to a vegetable-based oil that was solid at room temperature. Crisco even switched to palm oil.
You shouldn’t notice much of a taste difference, though. It’s all pretty neutral.
The ubiquitous use of palm oil is directly contributing to the devastation of rain forest, particularly in Indonesia. This in turn results in all of those destroyed trees releasing their CO2 into the atmosphere, which is then compounded by the burning of said trees. Global warming anybody? I would urge you not to use products containing this oil.
Well, at least it’s getting us off the hook Unca Cecil mentioned so long ago… that because folks in developed countries weren’t buying and eating the stuff, the poor peasants in the producing companies were forced to. “Slow motion hand grenade” was the stellar description, IIRC.
It’s much like quinoa, which used to be a cheap staple for South American peasants and is now too expensive for them to buy… because post-yupster foodies have “discovered” it. (My brother, a lifetime vegetarian, recently tried it for the first time and said, essentially, Yecch!)
It’s the latest cause celebre. Deforestation for cash crops has been going on for a very long time. I was really struck by it in Uganda when we went to the aptly named Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. You drive for several hours out of Kampala, through rolling hills that are nearly completely covered with banana palms, tea plantations and coffee bean shrubs. When you first sight the forest, it’s like looking at a very tall green wall rising abruptly out of the ground. It’s quite a stark contrast, and you can easily imagine what the country used to look like.
The problem with replanting these areas with palms and other cash crops is that the trees/bushes have a much shorter lifespan than what was removed. This means that instead of trees that live for 100 years, farmers are cutting down these plants after 8-10 years, burning them, and then replanting. Each time, of course, more CO2 is released into the air. Thus endeth the lecture, and my apologies to you for the hijack.