Coconut Oil
Lecture by Dr. Joseph Mercola
Dr. Joseph Mercola: Hello, this is Dr. Mercola and I’ve been practicing medicine for over 25 years. I’ve been passionate about using simple, inexpensive lifestyle modifications, especially like dietary choices, to improve your health. And, in my study of nutrition I’ve come to learn and appreciate that one of the most powerful things, and one of the most important choices you can make is what fat you put in your body.
Now, it is really crucial that you understand that Omega 3 fats are vitally important to use and that [the] Omega 3 to Omega 6 ratio is crucial. If you don’t understand that please type in Omega 3 fats on my sites to learn more about this because it is just vital that you get enough of that into your diet.
Now, another important part is to stay away from the bad fats and we all know there’s no disagreement from any of the experts in health that trans fats are bad for you, although, 20 years ago that was somewhat controversial, but right now there is absolutely no controversy. Trans fat can increase your risk for chronic, degenerative diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, heart disease, you name it, but it’s bad news and you really want to avoid it. But, unfortunately, trans fat has vilified a type of fat that’s been associated typically, which is saturated fat. So, many of the studies that purport negative consequences from the intake of saturated fat are actually documenting the dangers of consuming trans fat. So, if this sounds confusing to you then you clearly want—type that up on my site—and you’ll find more details and specific studies that reference that, but it’s important to understand that’s there’s a lot of negative media about saturated fat and it’s not true because we all need some amounts of saturated fats—some more than others.
Now, I think one of the best sources of saturated fat is coconut oil, and it’s something that I use personally. I happen to love coconuts and coconut oil. Some people don’t like coconuts because they don’t like the smell of coconuts; if that happens to be you it’s probably not a good idea to use a lot of coconut oil.
But, when you’re going to use—many people use fats to cook with—there’s some real important principles you need to understand if you’re going to stay healthy. Now, there are a lot of healthy unsaturated fats, the polyunsaturated fats, and these would be many of the vegetable oils, like sesame seed oil, sunflower oil, flaxseed oil—great oils but when you heat these oils, because they have unsaturated fats in there—these unsaturated fats are highly susceptible, highly sensitive to damage, oxidative damage, when you heat the oil. So, the more you heat them the worse it is. They can form things like cross linking; they can become polymerized; the bonds can shift; they can form toxic, cyclic fats that really can cause havoc and wreck up your biochemistry and physiology. So, you really do not want to heat oils to cook. Now, I’m a strong believer and proponent of having as much raw food as possible. And, I really don’t advocate cooking food much at all, but if you choose to cook food because a lot of people do, then please, please, please select an oil that is not going to be heat damaged as much when you cook with it. So, one of the best oils you can possibly cook with, far better than olive oil because even olive oil has unsaturated fat in it, so one of the best oils you can cook with is coconut oil because it is essentially, nearly all saturated fat. And, because there’s not much unsaturated fat in there, hardly any at all, it can’t cause these damaged molecules.
So, if you’re going to cook, I strongly recommend cooking with coconut oil. Now, coconut oil is a bit unusual if you haven’t worked with it before; it tends to be a solid at room temperature. At most room temperatures it has a relatively high melting point, about 76 degrees or so, so unless you’re in the summer and it’s like 80 degrees in your home, it’s going to be a solid, certainly if you put it in the fridge. But, in most of the winter months and most of the year it will be a solid and the closer it gets to 80 degrees or so, the more likely it will be a liquid. It’s important to know. Now, there’s some other benefits of coconut oil.
Coconut oil is also full of something called medium chain triglycerides or MCT oils. It’s full of them and you’ve probably heard a lot of the benefits about that, but it also has medium chain fatty acids, something called lauric acid or monlaurin and the only other known concentration of this fat is in breast milk—very powerful immune stimulator. So, that’s something that you’d like to incorporate into your diet for sure. One of the other uses of coconut oil is that you can use it as a massage or skin oil.
It’s important to understand that if you do use a skin lotion or moisturizer, that anything you put on your skin is really going to go into your bloodstream; there’s a direct route to it and there are many medications that are applied this way. So, if you don’t feel comfortable eating the skin lotion or moisturizer you’re using then I would recommend not using it and consider something like high quality coconut oil.
Now, what is a high quality coconut oil? Well, first I’d recommend getting something organic because that’s going to minimize any risk of potential toxic pesticides in it. But….also, an important component is you want to take it off (the lid) and you want to smell it and see how its smells. Does it smell like fresh coconuts like you’ve just harvested the coconut or cracked it open? If it does then you probably have a good one. If it doesn’t smell then you really want to consider finding another one.
So, we searched long and hard. We found one from Fresh Origins and it’s really outstanding. But, there are others but if it meets this criteria then that’s clearly one you’re going to want to consider. Hopefully, this has been helpful because what we want to do in this segment is give you loads of information that the basic truths that you can have so that once you have this information you can avoid toxic medications and surgery so that you can start to take control of your health.
Dr Joseph Mercola
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