Most varieties of coconut oil contain 40% lauric acid. Lauric acid is immensely disease fighting, so adept in fact at fighting viral pathogens, that it is present in large quantities in breast milk. The disease fighting abilities in lauric acid come from the fact that it is a medium chain fatty acid which gets formed into monolaurin in the human body. Monolaurin is the antiviral, antibacterial, and antiprotozoal monoglyceride used by the body to destroy lipid-coated viruses such as HIV, herpes, cytomegalovirus, influenza and various pathogenic bacteria.

Also, approximately 6 to 7 percent of the fatty acids in coconut fat are capric acid. Capric acid is another medium chain fatty acid, which has a similar beneficial function when it is formed into monocaprin in the body. Monocaprin has also been shown to have antiviral effects against HIV and is being tested for antiviral effects against herpes simplex and antibacterial effects against chlamydia and other sexually transmitted bacteria.

No! In fact coconut oil has been used as cooking oil for thousands of years. Popular cookbooks advertised it at the end of the 19th century. Unfortunately during World War II, the Japanese military occupied the Philippines and other South Pacific islands, and the once plentiful supply of coconut oil was effectively cut off from the rest of the world.

As a result, manufacturers began to develop alternative sources of cooking oils, and the polyunsaturated oils phase was born. By the time the war was over, there was a lot of money at stake in the promotion of these polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Hence the onslaught of the anti-saturated fat campaign. The campaign promoted polyunsaturated fats, such as flaxseed, canola, soybean, sunflower, corn, and other seeds and nut oils plus their partially hydrogenated counterparts as the way to go while saturated fats were casually linked to high cholesterol and heart disease, multiple sclerosis and other bad health conditions.

Unfortunately, the tropical oil industry, centered in poorer nations like the Philippines and Indonesia, could not afford to counter the negative propaganda spread by the rich first world industrial conglomerates.

There really is no truth to the bad ‘rap’ that saturated fats have. Basically the entire world consumes nothing but poly-unsaturated fats as nearly all commercial foods, from biscuits to drinks to cereals to breads contain it. It would have actually been hard to find someone on a high saturated fat diet at the time in America where the campaign started.

Furthermore, modern research has shown that not all saturated fats are alike and that the fatty acids in coconut oil, the medium chain triglycerides, do not raise serum cholesterol or contribute to heart disease, but are in fact very healthy. These medium chain fatty acids are not stored in the body as fat as they are immediately released and made available for energy. Other studies have clearly shown that traditional Asian cultures that eat significant amounts of coconut in their diet do not suffer from modern diseases seen in western cultures that promote a low-fat diet.