Filipino Scientist Corrects Long-Standing ‘Fake News’ Against Coconut Oil

Coconut oil has been a victim of what we more popularly call these days as ‘fake news’.  For over five decades now, it has wrongly been associated with higher risks for coronary heart disease.  The long-standing misinformation has started in the U.S. in 1957, when an American medical researcher, Dr. Ancel Keys, identified coconut oil as a harmful food ingredient because, as he claimed, it was a ‘saturated fat’ which can lead to heart ailments.  
Dr. Fabian Dayrit, President of the Integrated Chemists of the Philippines and Vice President of the National Academy of Science and Technology, explains how the misconception about coconut oil began and why it is high time to finally correct that by stating no less than scientific truths. “Dr. Key wrongly linked saturated fat and high bad cholesterol levels, which he then associated with heart disease,” Dr. Dayrit said.  “As a vegetable oil, coconut oil is about 92 percent saturated fat, which may have prompted the wrong notion that it is as harmful.  But this link has created a great impact, eroding the perception about the oil not just in the U.S. but also around the world.”
Dr. Dayrit simplified the explanation why coconut oil is not harmful.  Animal fats contain long-chain saturated fats, while coconut oil has medium-chain saturated fats.  In the human body, these two types of chained fats are metabolized differently long chain fats turn into good and bad cholesterol while medium chain fats go directly to the liver and are quickly metabolized to produce energy.  
Traditional American diets include food items that contain long-chain saturated fats from animals, particularly tallow and lard. This was where the pitfall came in, most American dieticians and health experts simply categorized all saturated fats into a single group, wrongly dragging the coconut oil into the health guideline they released.  The misconception was further upheld in the 1980s when the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended consumption of unsaturated fats (like margarine that contains high amounts of trans-fats) instead of saturated fats (which again include coconut oil).   
Meanwhile, several studies conducted in the 1980s in the Philippines, Indonesia, India, and the Polynesian Islands, tropical countries where coconut is widely consumed, had found that coconut oil did not directly lead to incidences of heart diseases.  In 1987, researchers from the Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute also found that Bicolanos, who are known for their coconut-rich diet, had the lowest incidence of cardiovascular diseases reported compared to all regions in the study.
Dr. Dayrit will discuss more about the history of errors involving the coconut oil in a plenary session about Health and Wellness in the upcoming World Coconut Congress conference on August 14-16, to be held at the SMX Convention Center Manila, in Pasay City.  The World Coconut Congress is the flagship event of this year’s 32nd National Coconut Week Celebration.  For more information about the Congress, please visit the conference website at www.worldcoconutcongress.com.