Coconut Oil Diet

Sadly, coconut oil and other saturated fats have been labeled as the cause of high cholesterol, clogging the arteries and other negative things. However, many studies done on people who live in tropical parts of the world, thereby consuming large quantities of coconut oil, show that the reverse is true. If you look at it from a purely logical standpoint, you would have to figure that if coconut and palm oils cause heart disease, it would be very pronounced in those areas! Rather, people who live in the tropics and consume lots of coconut and palm oils have about the lowest incidence of heart disease in the world!

I’d like to refer to one study that was published back in 1981. The study may be old, but it doesn’t matter to prove this point. The study was done to demonstrate whether saturated fat and dietary cholesterol affected serum cholesterol levels. Two islands in the South Pacific were used as a testing ground to prove a theory. The study actually started in the 1960s, before foods that western populations ate were in the population’s diet. At this time, the islanders had a diet heavy in coconut oil, with around 60% of the daily calories coming from the saturated fat of the coconut. This study showed that the islanders were very healthy and had few signs of the types of diseases found in the western world, including heart disease and obesity. The conclusion reached by this study was that neither island population had much vascular disease and therefore their diets high in saturated fats didn’t have a negative effect on their health.

Another study that was conducted in India compared cooking with traditional oils such as coconut oil or ghee to modern oils and how it affected the increase of heart disease and Type II diabetes. The findings of this study showed that both of these afflictions had been on the rise since people had moved away from using traditional oils and had started using refined vegetable oils, such as safflower and sunflower oils, which had been touted as heart friendly, simply because they were polyunsaturated.