The Demonisation Of Coconut Oil
Shock-horror headlines have
raised an obvious question: If coconut oil is poison then why are there so many
healthy Malayalis?
Is coconut oil really
poison? If you have been following the recent headlines, then you will know why
I am asking the question. In a speech delivered at the University of Freiburg,
the director of the university’s Institute for Prevention and Cancer
Epidemiology, a Dr. Karin Michels, (who is also director of the Harvard T.H.
Chan School of Public Health), described coconut oil as “one of the worst foods
you can eat”. It was, Dr. Michels said, just as bad for your well-being as
“pure poison.”
Coconut oil occupies a special place in the diet of
Kerala and in fact, Malayalis are healthier than say, North Indians
The speech was picked up
by news agencies and by the time it turned up in our newspapers, the short
version read: “Harvard Professor says coconut oil is poison.”
This caused shock and
panic in India where people asked the obvious question: if coconut oil is
poison then why are there so many healthy Malayalis?
Given the special place
that coconut oil occupies in the diet of Kerala, it should surely have led to
death or massive ill-health at the very least if it was really poison. In fact,
Malayalis may well be healthier than say, North Indians.
Personally, I think Dr.
Michels overstated the case and the shock-horror news headlines did not help.
But to figure out what I imagine the good doctor was getting at, we need to
understand the current state of our knowledge about cardiac disease and bust
American myths about so-called superfoods.
For years and years (i.e.
when your doctor was probably learning medicine), science operated on a
plumbing model of the heart. In this model, the heart was a pump and the
arteries leading out from it were pipes. If you consumed greasy foods, then
this grease would accumulate in the arteries and clog the pipes. As the heart
had to work harder and harder to push blood through these narrowing pipes, it
got weaker and weaker and eventually you had a heart attack.
Some fats were worse than
others. Fats that came from animal sources (butter, lard etc.) were called saturated
fats and were to be avoided. Fats that came from plants (olive oil, sunflower
oil, etc.) were usually unsaturated and less likely to harm your heart.
This orthodoxy led to the
demonisation of ghee and butter, the rise in the popularity of vanaspati,
margarine and eventually, to the olive oil boom.
All went well till
scientists came to the conclusion that another category of fats, called trans
fats were actually worse for you than butter or ghee. This category included
vanaspati, margarine and the like. So we were told to go back to eating butter
and ghee. The changing fat orthodoxy was tied to the great cholesterol scare.
Certain foods (eggs, lobster, etc.) were high in cholesterol. They were to be
avoided because cholesterol also clogged the arteries in the old heart-pump
model.
Over the last decades,
pretty much all of this stuff has been called into question. Scientists now
concede that there is a very weak link between dietary cholesterol and blood
cholesterol. At best, only around 15 per cent of the cholesterol in your body
comes from your diet. And so, cholesterol-rich foods are back on the approved
list.
Even the plumbing model
of the heart has been discredited. It isn’t as simple as grease clogging the
arteries. Various kinds of inflammation may well be a more significant cause of
heart episodes.
As the orthodoxy changes
every six months, the layman has ight to get confused. The problem is that
doctors often pretend know more than they really do. And the press is so hungry
for ock-horror headlines that complex discoveries are trivialised.
Ask
yourself this: Is it even conceivable that the food of Kerala, the finest
cuisine of India, is based on poison?
Let’s take the so-called French paradox. For years and
years, doctors would trot this out to praise the virtues of olive oil. Though
this was fudged in the news reporting, all the evidence for the French paradox
came from statistics not from biology.
Put simply, the French
paradox was this: though the French liked a rich diet, they had the lowest rate
of heart disease. How could this be so?
To explain this
statistical paradox, scientists came up with all sorts of theories. It was red
wine, they said, which cleared the arteries. Or it was the miracle of olive oil
which contains substances that actually remove plaque from the arteries.
All this was reported
again and again. Except that it was nonsense. The regions of France with the
lowest incidence of heart disease were in the North, where they cooked in
butter and lard and rarely used olive oil.
So yes, there may have
been a statistical paradox. But scientists had no explanation for it. And in
any case, French rates of heart disease are now roughly on par with the rest of
Western Europe, so the so-called French Paradox has vanished.
One problem with so much
of the research you will find reported is that it is not based on any
understanding of how the body functions but on statistics. A group of
volunteers will be told to, say, drink two glasses of red wine a day. At the
end of a year, they will compare the rate of heart disease among these
volunteers with either a non-wine drinking control group or the general public.
Should the wine-drinkers
have even a marginally lower rate of heart disease, the headlines will declare
“Red wine can stop heart attacks!”
This may or may not be
true. What the headlines will obscure is that scientists will still have no
idea of how the wine reduced the incidence of heart disease; the biology will
remain a mystery. The following year, another group of scientists will run another
statistical group study which may yield different results and a new set of
headlines: “Red wine may harm your heart!”
Is it any wonder that the
layperson is so confused? That we can’t understand why scientists keep changing
their minds?
Faddists exploit this
confusion and profit from the increasingly unconvincing tendency of doctors to
act like they know everything.
Coconut oil is just the
latest example. The coconut is one of the few plant-based foods to yield an oil
that is a saturated fat. (That’s why coconut milk is often substituted for
cow’s milk in cooking.)
For years and years,
American nutritionists ran a campaign against the use of coconut oil at fast
food concessions. One celebrated case involved movie theatre popcorn. If you
pop your corn in your microwave at home, it is free of saturated fat. (Unless
you then add butter.) But at nearly all US movie theatres, till a decade ago,
the popcorn was popped in coconut oil. Even without the butter, the popcorn was
rich in saturated fat from the coconut oil.
After a sustained health
campaign, movie theaters agreed to stop using coconut oil and the popularity of
coconut oil fell to zero in America, where it was seen as an artery-clogger.
But then, as the health
establishment began to admit it did not really understand how fats affected the
body, the door was left open for faddists. Last year, The Lancet, a respected
medical journal encouraged faddists further by publishing a study that
suggested that following a low fat diet could actually increase your risk of
death by 25 per cent.
In the midst of all this
confusion, faddists promoted so-called “good” saturated fats of which coconut
oil was one. According to the faddists, coconut oil actually increased the
proportion of good cholesterol in your body.
Now, health faddists will
tell you that coconut oil will promote fat burning. The fats in coconut oil
will go straight to your liver and will be turned into ketones which can treat
Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. And so on.
Nearly all of these
claims are dubious. It is possible that some ingredients in coconut oil are
good for you, but nobody who has used it for generations (i.e. the people of
Kerala) claims that it is an all-purpose superfood. And yet, people have made
millions out of gullible Americans by pushing the notion of coconut oil as a
superfood.
My guess is that Dr.
Michels was trying to remind people that coconut oil is not a superfood but a
source of saturated fat. That straightforward and largely accurate central
message got lost in the din of the headlines.
But Dr. Michels also used
needlessly emotive language like ‘poison’, which is just plain nonsense.
Yes, there is a case for
consuming butter, ghee, animal fats and coconut oil in moderation. But they are
not poisons. They are the foods that have sustained mankind for generations.
When doctors condemn them and then – very embarrassingly – change their minds
and backtrack, they confuse lay people. But they do even more damage to the
reputation of medicine as a whole by making categorical claims based on limited
knowledge.
As for coconut oil being
poison, ask yourself this: is it even conceivable that the food of Kerala, the
finest cuisine in India, is based on poison?
vir sanghvi
HTBR16SEP18
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