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The Story of Coconut Oil. |
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Coconut
and its products have been used by our ancestors for
centuries. It was only in the last few decades there has
been a sustained campaign to malign the name of this
important supplement of our staple food, in the wet
tropical belt in the world. I have a feeling that this is
supported by the vested interests who want to sell other
oils in the market. Lot of data have accumulated over
these years about coconut oil and needs to be told to the
public, since this oil is one of the best supplements.
Curiously our ideas of nutrition have come from very
shaky background, whereas our ancestors wisdom in using
coconut as a food article is derived from thousands of
years of observation and experience.
This new type of research is called qualitative research
in contrast to the quantitative research of the
conventional science. Qualitative research is used in all
social sciences and it should come to medicine in a big
way for us to understand human biology, the latter is
governed mainly by the human mind. The ramifications of
the human mind can never be assessed correctly by the
reductionist science and the quantitative research. The
use of coconut oil by our ancestors was the result of the
observational qualitative research for thousands of
years.
The confusion created by this kind of propaganda has made
the literate population get scared of using coconut oil
in diet. Let us look at this story in a very scientific
way. It is true that excessive use of dietary fat is very
bad for human health. It is also true that fat is
very essential for human health as all the cell
walls are made up of fat and a few million cells are
replaced every day in the body. The best way of taking
fat is to restrict the total calorie intake of fat to be
restricted to about 12% of the daily requirement and not
more. If one avoids fat totally one gets into problems
much more serious than having more fat in the blood.
Coconut oil is rich in saturated fat, and that is why it
is bracketed with animal fat by many people. It should
be noted that coconut oil has no cholesterol as the
latter is a component of animal fat only. However
intake of saturated fat may result in elevation of the
blood cholesterol levels. All oils are not the same.
Coconut oil is very good food as most of its saturated
fatty acids are what we call medium chain fatty acids
(MCFAs) They account for nearly 64% of the fatty acids in
coconut oil. It is only coconut oil and palm kernel
oil, among all the edible oils, that contain these
good MCFAs. All other vegetable oils and the animal oils
contain what we call long chain fatty acids ( more than
12 carbon atoms ). Both the saturated and the unsaturated
fatty acids in all these oils contain long chain fatty
acids ( LCFAs ). The only exception is butter fat
with 12% of fatty acids being short chain ones.
Unfortunately those who equate coconut oil with other
saturated fats do not know that saturated fats have
different varieties as described above. Coconut oils is
,therefore, different from all other oils
containing saturated fatty acids.
Coconut oil being a MCFAs oil has certain definite
advantages over other LCFAs. The digestion of coconut
oils is faster and starts almost in the mouth itself and
undergoes complete digestion in the stomach and upper
intestine not requiring the pancreatic juice
lipase for its digestion. It is also better solubility in
biological fluids. It gets absorbed directly into the
portal blood and is carried to the liver directly to
undergo rapid oxidation to release energy. Other oils and
animal fats containing LCFAs need the pancreatic lipase
for their digestion and they are not that easily mixing
with biological fluids and so are absorbed after being
re-esterified inside the intestinal cells into
triglycerides. They are first incorporated into the large
insoluble particles called chylomicrons by the intestinal
cells. These then go to the liver via the lymphatics and
the systemic circulation, thereby going round all parts
of the body before going to the liver for final
oxidation. They are , therefore, more likely to get
deposited as fats and also change the blood fat content.
Coconut oil, therefore, does not produce any
significant change in the circulating VLDL, supposed
to be very bad for vessel thickening, the dreaded
atherosclerosis.
Because of the above advantages coconut oil is preferred
as medicinal oil in cooking for people who have bad
digestion and also in infant feeds to supply fat content.
Addition of coconut oil to infant feeds helps absorption
of calcium and magnesium and could help treat rickets in
poor nations of the world . Another distinct feature of
coconut oil is that it has 2.56 % less calories per
gramme of fat compared to all other oils having
LCFAs.
The only disadvantage
of coconut oil as the sole supply of daily fat need is
the poor levels of essential fatty acids in coconut oil.
But since our staple food contains cereals, pulses,
roots, tubers and also fish enough and more of essential
fatty acids are supplied in our daily ration. If one is
taking the usual balanced diet of 2400 Kcalories we need
only as low as 72 Kcal of essential fatty acids,
which is more than met by other foods mentioned above.
What the common man does not know is that the use of the
new artificial oils, claiming to have a high content of
polyunsaturated fats are bad for health as they produce
large amounts of oxidants in the body which eventually
make the cells age faster and also die, in the absence of
a large supply of vitamin E. Most polyunsaturated oils
are supplied to the consumer as hydrogenated form to
avoid rancidity and that gives the oil the bad effects on
the body. It is now known that butter is safer than
margarine. [index]
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