Coconut Oil
Coconut oil has been called the “Healthiest dietary oil on earth”
According to Dr. Mercola’s articles and newsletters, multiple studies on Pacific Island populations who get 30-60% of their total caloric intake from fully saturated coconut oil have all shown nearly non-existent rates of cardiovascular disease.
As early as 1981, research done by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition demonstrated that “In fact, no evidence exists that the naturally occurring high saturated fat intake had any kind of harmful effect in these populations!”
More recently, an article printed April of 2017 in Medical News Today reported:
The article is the result of a collaboration between a team of cardiologists, including: Dr. Aseem Malhotra, of Lister Hospital in Stevenage, in the United Kingdom; Prof. Rita Redberg, of the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine and editor of JAMA Internal Medicine; and Pascal Meier, of University Hospital Geneva in Switzerland and University College London, who is also the editor of BMJ Open Heart.
The team cited reviews that show no association between intake of saturated fat and a greater risk of heart disease, in order to support their argument against the existence of artery-clogging saturated fat.
“It is time to shift the public health message in the prevention and treatment of coronary artery disease away from measuring serum lipids and reducing dietary saturated fat,” say the authors. Instead of focusing on lowering blood fats and cutting out dietary saturated fats, the importance of eating “real food,” partaking in regular physical activity, and minimizing stress, should all be emphasized.
According to Malhotra, Redberg, and Meier, the current approach to managing heart disease echoes the practice of plumbing, but the notion of improving the condition by “unclogging a pipe” has been invalidated by a series of clinical trials. The trials found that when a stent was inserted to widen narrowed arteries, the risk of heart attack or death was not lessened.
Coconut oil is a medium chain fatty acid (MCFA) with naturally occurring saturated fat that actually has some amazing health benefits, such as:
- Promoting your heart health
- Promoting fat metabolism
- Supporting your immune system health
- Supporting a healthy metabolism by supporting thyroid function
- Providing you with an immediate energy source
- Keeping your skin healthy and youthful looking
Coconut Oil’s Secret Ingredients
Fifty percent of the fat content in coconut oil is a fat rarely found in nature called lauric acid. Your body converts lauric acid into monolaurin, which has anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-protozoa properties. Monolaurin is a monoglyceride which can actually destroy lipid (fat) coated viruses such as: HIV, herpes, measles, influenza virus, various pathogenic bacteria and protozoa such as giardia lamblia.
Because lauric acid is abundant in breast milk, lactating mothers who add coconut oil to their diet can substantially increase the production of their own breast milk. This addition will also help breastfed babies fight colds and infections. In countries where coconut oil is part of the staple diet, lauric acid levels in breast milk can be as high as 21% (normally around 3%).
Caprylic and Capric acid are medium chain triglycerides that are also found in both breast milk and Coconut oil. A study published in the journal ‘Food Microbiology’ in October 2004 found that caprylic acid was able to inhibit E. coli and other food borne bacteria.
In a study published in the journal ‘Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy’ in November 2001, capric acid was found to inhibit the growth of Candida albicans, a fungal organism that is responsible for many human yeast infections.
The Ultimate Fuel Source
Studies have also shown that the amount of energy your body uses to metabolize these MCFAs is more than the energy provided by the MCFAs. In other words, you will burn more calories than are contained in coconut oil just by your body digesting, or metabolizing the oil. In fact, according to many scientists, lauric acid is more quickly metabolized than any other fatty acid.
Long chain triglycerides taken into your body must be mixed with bile released from your gallbladder before it can be broken down in your digestive system. While these LCTs are essential to cell integrity and the prevention of inflammation on a cellular level, LCTs cannot cross the blood brain barrier.
Here is a good analogy: LCTs are like heavy, wet logs that you put on a small camp fire. Keep adding the logs, and soon you have more logs than fire. MCTs, by comparison, are like rolled up newspaper soaked in gasoline. They not only burn brightly, they burn up the wet logs as well
Medium chain fatty acids (also known as medium chain triglycerides MCT) are not processed by your body in the same manner. MCFAs go directly to your liver, which naturally converts the oil into ketones, bypassing the bile entirely. Your liver then immediately releases the ketones into your bloodstream where they are transported to your brain to be used as fuel. In fact, ketones appear to be the preferred source of brain food in patients affected by diabetes or Alzheimer’s.
According to Dr. Mary Newport: http://www.coconutketones.com/whatifcure.pdf
“In Alzheimer’s disease, the neurons in certain areas of the brain are unable to take in glucose due to insulin resistance and slowly die off, a process that appears to happen one or more decades before the symptoms become apparent. If these cells had access to ketone bodies, they could potentially stay alive and continue to function.”
Because Coconut oil does not produce an insulin spike in your bloodstream it can feed your brain without any of the debilitating insulin-related effects associated with long-term high carbohydrate consumption! A brain receiving adequate fuel does not crave fast-acting simple carbohydrates, making it much easier for a diabetic or pre-disposed diabetic to make better food choices.
The brain endeavors to balance excitation and inhibition through two main neurotransmitters, the excitatory glutamate and the inhibitory GABA. Tilt the scale towards glutamate, which occurs in stroke, seizures and neurodegeneration, and you get excitotoxicity. In other words, hyper-activity is toxic.
MSG, or monosodium glutamate and aspartame are the two most well-known excitotoxins. Read labels. Don’t think food is MSG-free just because you don’t see it in the ingredients list. MSG also appears under the names:
Natural flavor(s)
Flavoring
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein
Autolyzed protein
Plant Protein
Textured Protein
Yeast extract
Nutritional yeast
Carrageenan
Anything with glutamate
Aspartate, or aspartic acid, acts very similarly to glutamate. This non-essential amino acid triggers NMDA receptors in cells, another of the cellular receptors used to initiate cell death. Most humans receive aspartate through consuming aspartame, an artificial sweetener often hidden in many processed foods. It has been linked with serious neurological effects such as headaches, sleep disorders, and seizures.
Back in the 1930s, researchers found that direct injection of various ketone bodies into rabbits prevented chemically-induced seizures through inhibiting glutamate release. A more recent study done in 2013 showed that ketones directly inhibited the neuron’s ability to “load up” on glutamate and increase GABA.
Cancer Protection
The brain is “metabolically privileged”, meaning in the case of low fuel our body will feed the brain first. Also, the metabolic rate of the brain is constant unlike other tissues which are able to reduce their metabolic requirements during starvation or reduced physical activity. If your body cannot easily metabolize fat, your brain will make you crave easy to metabolize simple carbohydrates.
The primary fuel source for the brain is glucose and the energy-hungry brain generally uses 60-70% of the total body glucose requirements. In fact, all of the body’s cells are primarily fueled by glucose. This includes cancer cells. However, cancer cells have one built-in fatal flaw – they do not have the metabolic flexibility of your regular cells. Cancer cells cannot adapt to use ketone bodies for fuel as all your other cells can.
So, when you alter your diet and become what’s known as “fat-adapted,” your body starts using fat for fuel rather than carbs. One molecule of fat yields 460 molecules of ATP (energy), whereas one molecule of glucose yields only 36 molecules of ATP. When you switch out the carbs for healthy fats, you starve the cancer out, as you’re no longer supplying the necessary fuel – glucose – for their growth.
Contradiction and Confusion:
As early as 1940 scientists have been aware that not all fat is detrimental to our health. Farmers in the 1940’s found out about this effect by accident when they tried using inexpensive coconut oil to fatten their livestock. It didn’t work! Instead, coconut oil made the animals lean, active and hungry.
It is apparent that not all saturated fats are created equal. There are saturated fats that occur naturally, while other fats are artificially manipulated through the man-made process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenation manipulates vegetable and seed oils by adding hydrogen atoms while heating the oil, producing a rancid, thickened oil that really only benefits processed food shelf life and corporate profits.
The medical and scientific communities are now fairly united in the opinion that hydrogenated vegetable and seed oils (trans fats) should be avoided. Unfortunately, the vilification of hydrogenated saturated fats has created a mind set of “if one form of saturated fat is bad for you, then all saturated fat must be bad”.
In 2013, an editorial in the British Medical Journal described how the avoidance of saturated fat actually promotes poor health in a number of ways, including through their association with LDL cholesterol. As stated by the author Dr. Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital in London:
“The aspect of dietary saturated fat that is believed to have the greatest influence on cardiovascular risk is elevated concentrations of low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol.
Yet the reduction in LDL cholesterol from reducing saturated fat intake seems to be specific to large, buoyant (type A) LDL particles, when in fact it is the small, dense (type B) particles (responsive to carbohydrate intake) that are implicated in cardiovascular disease. Indeed, recent prospective cohort studies have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk. Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective.”
Saturated fats:
- Increase your LDL levels, but they increase the large fluffy particles that are NOT associated with an increased risk of heart disease.
- Increase your HDL levels, which also compensates for any increase in LDL.
- Do NOT cause heart disease as made clear in all the above referenced studies.
- Do not damage as easily as other fats because they do not have double bonds that can be damaged through oxidation.
- Serves as a “clean-burning fuel” for your brain and mitochondria, producing far less damaging free radicals than sugars and non-fiber carbs.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/04/25/saturated-fat-finally-vindicated.aspx
Coconut oil is stable at high heat, making it a perfect cooking oil and at the same time can be used like butter. Spread it on wholegrain toast or use in your steel cut oats. We consider it mandatory in your breakfast smoothie every morning. It will prevent the roller coaster sugar levels and sustain your energy until the next meal. Also try an afternoon snack or evening dessert made with this great brain balancer and mood regulator.
Quality Coconut Oil
Share this:
thrivecoach12 