February 7, 2006
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Coconuts and coconut oil have become popular, but experts are divided on how good they are for us.
Mail Tribune / Jim Craven
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Crazy for coconuts: They’re tasty, yes, but are they good for you?
By JENNIFER MARGULIS
for the Mail Tribune
Coconuts are enjoying a surge in popularity, both in the Rogue Valley and nationwide. But while more of us are eating coconuts and using coconut oil to fry foods, the jury’s still out on
just how healthy a coconut really is.
"Even as a kid I loved (coconut)," says Olina St. Onge, who lives in Medford and works as a patient educator at Imperia Laser Eye Center. "I remember once sneaking into the kitchen
cabinets for coconut, and I snuck off to my room and hid and then I ate the whole bag of (sweetened coconut). I’ve always enjoyed it."
St. Onge ate a fresh coconut for the first time eight years ago when she lived in Oahu, Hawaii, and was on a field trip with her daughter’s school. Some teachers cracked open a coconut with
a whack of a machete. She enjoyed drinking the fresh coconut milk and using her bottom teeth to gnaw the flesh of the coconut from the shell.
Still, St. Onge does not eat coconuts very often. A health-conscious vegan, she’s not sure coconuts are actually all that good for her health. The fruit is high in saturated fat, after all,
and St. Onge has read that saturated fats are unhealthy.
But a retired professor from Cornell University who now lives in Ashland says St. Onge and other coconut fans need not be so wary.
Our bodies need beneficial fats, both to produce energy and to fuel the brain, says Paul Buck, who has a doctoral degree in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley and who held
a joint appointment in the Department of Food Science and the Graduate School of Nutrition at Cornell.
Buck says that to understand the health benefits of the fat in coconut, one must understand the coconut itself. A coconut palm has 80-100 fruits on it and the tree grows 50-100 feet tall,
depending on the variety.
The coconut, says Buck, is actually "a hard covered fruit." Inside this fruit you find the copra, which is the hard white material that is dried for shredded coconut. When a coconut is
allowed to grow into a tree, it is the copra that is the source of nutrients that feeds the sapling for the first seven or eight months of its growth cycle.
"By that time the sap or liquid, which we call coconut milk, has disappeared because it has fed the plant," says Buck. "There would be no coconut milk in a fruit that has started
to germinate."
According to Buck, coconuts have been enjoyed by humans for hundreds of years, long before the birth of Christ. "The fruit was always considered to be very nutritious," he says.
Coconut in its natural state consists of 4-5 percent protein, a variety of minerals, some desirable medium-chained saturated fat, some unsaturated fat, and some desirable short-chain fats.
To make coconut oil, the copra is dehydrated and the oil is pressed out of it. A ton of coconuts produces 300 pounds of copra, which in turn produces only 80 pounds of coconut oil, according to
Buck.
Coconut oil is made up of more than 45 percent lauric acid, a 12-carbon saturated fatty acid. In the body lauric acid converts to monolaurin, a fatty acid. This fatty acid is a main component of
a human mother’s breast milk and is thought to have a number of health-giving properties, boosting the immune systems in infancy and helping adults fight bacterial, fungal and viral
infections.
Coconut oil also contains myristic acid, caprylic acid, and caproic acid.
Buck says men and women, especially nursing women, need the fatty acids found in coconuts. "You can’t produce good breast milk and good colostrum unless you have these essential fatty
acids in your diet," says Buck. "These acids are found in breast milk and coconut oil."
Buck says medium-chain and long-chain fatty acids have earned a bad name though they should not have. "We have built up many myths and one of the myths that we have built up is that
saturated fat is bad for us and that’s not true," says Buck.
Ashland naturopath Geoff Houghton specifies that it is the balance of saturated and unsaturated fats in our diet that is important.
"The bottom line is all of our cell membranes have a lot of fat in them," says Houghton. "What kind depends on what fat we eat. We eat good fats and bad fats. If we tend to eat
lots of long saturated fats … the membranes become disproportionately formed by those fats. You don’t want it to be out of balance."
Houghton and Buck agree that the real problem is with hydrogenated oils. The food industry often adds hydrogen to fatty acids, which converts them into "hydrogenated" or "partially
hydrogenated" fatty acids, and gives oils a much longer shelf life.
"Because we wanted to fry in oil," says Buck, "we hydrogenated the oils." Hydrogenated oils add free radicals to our bodies, and the process of hydrogenating creates trans
fats, which our bodies cannot handle and which are rarely found in nature.
"There is every reason that people should use coconut oil but not the hydrogenated oil that industry sells," says Buck. "It’s the natural oil you want."
Although Houghton himself is sometimes partial to coconut, he is not as sure as Buck that people should be cooking with coconut oil and eating coconuts without reservation.
"It can be a little hard to tell what is good for you and what is less bad for you," says Houghton. "There’s a wide spectrum of oils, some of which are definitely good for
you, like fish oils. And then there are oils that are just plain bad, like Crisco. And then there are always ones in between."
Houghton adds: "Compared to Crisco, everything’s great. Coconut oil is probably pretty neutral-pointing or maybe good. I haven’t encountered good studies that compare coconut oils
versus other oils. Bottom line is I don’t think there is a lot of research on it."
When St. Onge does buy coconut, she buys unsweetened shredded coconut in the bulk section of the grocery store. She and her husband like to make it into an East Indian hot breakfast cereal with
millet.
"It’s a very spicy dish, it has dates in it, and it is very unusual," says St. Onge. "It’s very good and it’s a traditional East Indian breakfast food — kind of
a hot, sweet and sour food."
Jennifer Margulis is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail her at properzioprose@jeffnet.org.
