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Coconut Oil: You Want a Food Loaded with Real Health Benefits? You Want Coconut Oil
By Ray Peat
The following are excepts taken from Ray Peat's article which can be found at http://www.efn.org/~raypeat/
"I have already discussed the many toxic effects of the unsaturated oils, and I have frequently mentioned that coconut oil doesn't have those toxic effects, though it does contain a small amount of the unsaturated oils."
"Many people have asked me to write something on coconut oil. I thought I might write a small book on it, but I realize that there are no suitable channels for distributing such a book -- if the seed-oil industry can eliminate major corporate food products that have used coconut oil for a hundred years, they certainly have the power to prevent dealers from selling a book that would affect their market more seriously. For the present, I will just outline some of the virtues of coconut oil."
"The unsaturated oils in some cooked foods become rancid in just a few hours, even at refrigerator temperatures, and are responsible for the stale taste of leftover foods. (Eating slightly stale food isn't particularly harmful, since the same oils, even when eaten absolutely fresh, will oxidize at a much higher rate once they are in the body, where they are heated and thoroughly mixed with an abundance of oxygen.)"
Coconut Oil for Health & Weight Loss
When Albert Schweitzer operated his clinic in tropical Africa, he said it was many years before he saw any cases of cancer, and he believed that the appearance of cancer was caused by the change to the European type of diet. In the l920s, German researchers showed that mice on a fat-free diet were practically free of cancer.
Since then, many studies have demonstrated a very close association between consumption of unsaturated oils and the incidence of cancer.
Heart damage is easily produced in animals by feeding them linoleic acid; this "essential" fatty acid turned out to be the heart toxin in rape-seed oil.
The addition of saturated fat to the experimental heart-toxic oil-rich diet protects against the damage to heart cells.
Several years ago I met an old couple, who were only a few years apart in age, but the wife looked many years younger than her doddering old husband. She was from the Philippines, and she remarked that she always had to cook two meals at the same time, because her husband couldn't adapt to her traditional food. Three times every day, she still prepared her food in coconut oil. Her apparent youth increased my interest in the effects of coconut oil.
In the l960s, Hartroft and Porta gave an elegant argument for decreasing the ratio of unsaturated oil to saturated oil in the diet (and thus in the tissues). They showed that the "age pigment" is produced in proportion to the ratio of oxidants to antioxidants, multiplied by the ratio of unsaturated oils to saturated oils.
More recently, a variety of studies have demonstrated that ultraviolet light induces
per oxidation in unsaturated fats, but not saturated fats, and that this occurs in the skin as well as in the
laboratory.
Rabbit experiments, and studies of humans, showed that the amount of unsaturated oil in the diet strongly affects the rate at which aged, wrinkled skin develops.
The unsaturated fat in the skin is a major target for the aging and carcinogenic effects of ultraviolet light, though not necessarily the only one.
In the l940s, farmers attempted to use cheap coconut oil for fattening their animals, but they found that it made them lean, active and hungry. For a few years, an
ant thyroid drug was found to make the livestock get fat while eating less food, but then it was found to be a strong carcinogen, and it also probably produced hypothyroidism in the people who ate the meat.
By the late l940s, it was found that the same ant thyroid effect, causing animals to get fat without eating much food, could be achieved by using soy beans and corn as feed.
Later, an animal experiment fed diets that were low or high in total fat, and in different groups the fat was provided by pure coconut oil, or a pure unsaturated oil, or by various mixtures of the two oils. At the end of their lives, the animals' obesity increased directly in proportion to the ratio of unsaturated oil to coconut oil in their diet, and was not related to the total amount of fat they had consumed.
That is, animals which ate just a little pure unsaturated oil were fat, and animals which ate a lot of coconut oil were lean.
G. W. Crile and his wife found that the metabolic rate of people in Yucatan, where coconut is a staple food, averaged 25% higher than that of people in the United States.
In a hot climate, the adaptive tendency is to have a lower metabolic rate, so it is clear that some factor is more than offsetting this expected effect of high environmental temperatures. The people there are lean, and recently it has been observed that the women there have none of the symptoms we commonly associate with the menopause.
By l950, then, it was established that unsaturated fats suppress the metabolic
rate, apparently creating hypothyroidism.
Just as metabolism is "activated" by consumption of coconut oil, which prevents the inhibiting effect of unsaturated oils, other inhibited processes, such as clot removal and immune function, will probably tend to be restored by continuing use of coconut oil.
Continued...
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