Our lifestyles and other factors probably more harmful to our hearts than coconut oil
I was tempted to add my thoughts to the informative article by Kumudini Hettiarachchi in the Sunday Times of October 25 - ‘Now; coconut oil is bad for your heart’, wherein she has succinctly reviewed a comprehensive, recent research paper on coconut and coronary heart disease (CHD) by a team of medical researchers led by Prof. Ranil Jayawardena of the Colombo Medical Faculty.
As KH states coconut oil and its impact on health has been ‘swirled and twirled’ over the last six decades. From the 1960s for about 50 years it was treated virtually as a ‘poison’ in that it was labelled as contributing to cardiovascular diseases (heart disease and strokes).
Before the Second World War, coconut oil was the main dietary vegetable oil in the west. However, war disrupted the coconut oil supply and alternative oils such as soya and corn took its place. When coconut and palm oils supplies were resumed, the soya lobby together with the American Heart Association went on a malicious campaign urging even the US Federal government to ban importation of tropical oils. The U.S people then had less than 1 % energy from coconut in their diet!
By then the lipid hypothesis promulgated by Ancel Keys (1965) et al and Hegsted et al (1965) had taken root. The hypothesis is that saturated fats (SFA) in coconut, palm oil and animal fats increase cholesterol and hence the risk of heart disease whereas polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) in soya and corn oils decrease cholesterol and monounsaturated fats (MUFA) have a neutral or beneficial effect. Cholesterol was blamed as the villain, and coconut and palm oils were labelled “artery clogging tropical oils”.
Consequently, over the next two decades, butter (a saturated fat) consumption in the US dropped from 18 pounds per capita per year to10, and margarine filled the gap; vegetable oil, mostly soya oil and corn oil consumption increased threefold from 3 pounds to about 10 per capita per year, but heart attack rates did not decline! It was even said that Americans feared saturated fat more than they feared witches!
With the lipid hypothesis taking a strong foothold, cardiologists locally and elsewhere, strongly advised their patients to refrain from coconut oil consumption if their lipid levels were high. In fact an oft cracked joke was that the chief cardiologist in Peradeniya in the 1980s allowed only a tablespoon of ‘pol sambol’ per day for her husband, and no coconut oil at all!
However, over the years from 1975 the heart disease rate exponentially shot up whereas the per capita consumption of coconut dropped substantially, questioning whether coconut consumption is a serious risk factor in CHD.
The bad label on coconut oil is a consequence of it having 74% saturated fatty acids of which 64% comprising lauric (48%) myristic (17%) and palmetic ( 9%) are cholesterol- elevating. The dilemma is that lauric acid, on the other hand though cholesterol elevating, has a major health benefit. It is a component in mothers’ milk and gives immunity against microbial diseases together with capric acid (7%). Coconut oil has other health benefits too and regrettably there is no mention of them in the review referred to above. In fact it has now become the ‘darling vegetable oil of the west’.
However, coconut elevates HDL or the good cholesterol far more than LDL, the bad cholesterol which is said to form plaques that block blood vessels leading to angina and heart attacks. By contrast, HDL scavenges excess cholesterol from the blood and returns to the liver thus reducing plaque formation. In one study conducted in Sri Lanka by Shanthi Mendis et al (1989) coconut raised HDLC and LDLC by 69% and 32% respectively implying that the former should be negating substantially the bad effects of LDLC. The question then is whether coconut is a cardio-vascular health risk given especially the average per capita daily consumption of about one third to one fourth of a coconut which implies the energy intake via coconut is well below the WHO’s recommended saturated fat intake of 10% assuming a total per capita energy intake of 2500Kcal per day.
All evidence points to the fact that CHD is multi-factorial and lipid status in just one of them. This fact is brought home by the famous Faringham study cited even in medical texts. William P. Castelli, M.D (1992) in an editorial in the journal Internal Medicine states that “In Faringham, Mass, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, lower the person’s serum cholesterol,... the opposite of what the equation provided by Hegsted, et all(1965) and Keys et al (1957) would predict”. The fact was that people of the Faringham village did a lot of physical work. Then Walter Willett, M.D (1990) in an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health states: Even though “the focus of dietary recommendation is usually a reduction of saturated fat intake, no relation between saturated fat intake and the risk of CHD was observed in the most informative prospective study to date”. Furthermore, an exhaustive study by researchers from the University of South Florida, the Japanese Institute of Pharmacovigilance and several other reputed international institutions, and published in BMJ, a peer-reviewed journal, in 2016 concluded an inverse relationship between all-cause or cardiovascular mortality and LDL; and that over 60s lived longer with high bad cholesterol!
So there should be no risk in consuming coconut the way we do now! What matters is your total dietary composition and quantity, and of course, your lifestyle. Over the years, people have become more and more sedentary. Housewives are glued to the television. A high proportion of children, apart from their parents are obese and hardly take part in sports. Education has become highly competitive. The mothers virtually drag the children from school to the tuition class, stopping only at the pastry shop for a hurried lunch of pastries. The risk of coconut fat in cardio-vascular diseases, if at all, should be negligible compared to lifestyle and other factors!
Dr Parakrama Waidyanatha Via email