 Studies of populations who eat a lot of coconuts are frequently cited by those who sell coconut oil, as evidence that it does not have harmful effects. For example, there was an apparent absence of stroke and heart disease on the island of Cotiva. What were they eating? Well, their diets centered around tubers, like sweet potatoes, with fruits, greens, nuts, corn, and beans. Yes, they ate fish a few times a week, but they were eating largely whole food, plant-based diets, so no wonder they may have had such low rates of artery disease. And one of those whole foods was coconut, not coconut oil. Now, if you go to Puka Puka, they eat even more coconuts, and there's even an island where that's most of what they eat, and they get high cholesterol. But what's a population eating 87% plant-based? Red meat, chicken, and eggs only eaten seldomly, no dairy, doing with cholesterol levels over 200. Well, they're eating all these coconuts every day. What are their disease rates like? We don't know. There's no clinical surveys, no epidemiological data, no autopsies. They did do some EKGs, which can sometimes pick up evidence of past heart attacks and found few abnormalities, but the sample was too small to be a definitive study. And even if they did have low disease rates, they weren't eating coconut oil, they were eating coconuts. Coconut oil proponents pointing to these studies is like the high fructose corn syrup lobby pointing to studies of healthy populations who eat corn on the cob. Or the sugar industry pointing to studies on fruit consumption saying, see, eat all the refined sugar you want. But fruit has fiber, and so do coconuts. Just like adding psyllium fiber, metamucil, to coconut oil can help blunt the adverse effects on cholesterol, fiber derived from de-fatted coconut itself can reduce cholesterol levels as much as oat bran. And the plant protein in coconut, also missing from the oil, may also help explain why whole coconut may not have the same effects on cholesterol. Although coconut fat in the form of powdered coconut milk may not have the same effects on cholesterol's coconut oil, frequent consumption defined as three more times a week has been associated with increased risk of vascular disease, a stroke and heart attack. And no wonder, as coconut milk may acutely impair artery function as badly as a sausage and egg McMuffin. They tested three meals, three different meals, a Western high-fat meal comprised of an egg McMuffin sausage, McMuffin and two hash browns, versus a local high-fat meal. This was done in Singapore, so the more traditional high-fat meal was rice cooked with coconut milk, though there were also anchovies and an egg, versus the same amount of calories in an unhealthy low-fat meal comprised of frosted flakes, skim milk, and juice. Here's the artery function, the ability of the arteries to relax normally before Mickey D's and after, significantly crippling down artery function within hours of consumption and the same thing with the coconut milk. So whether mostly meat and oil fat or coconut milk fat, the artery similarly clamped down, whereas that horrible sugary breakfast had no effect, no bad effect on artery function, because as terrible as it was, it had no saturated fat at all, though it also didn't have any egg, which may have also helped. Coconut oil proponents also try to argue that coconut oil has MCTs, medium chain triglycerides, shorter chain saturated fats that aren't as bad as the longer chain saturated fats in meat and dairy. But you can't apply the MCT research to coconut oil. Why? MCT oil is composed of MCTs, the medium chain fats, caprylic and capric acid, about 50% of each, whereas those MCTs make up only like 10% of the coconut oil. Most of coconut oil is the cholesterol-raising longer chain saturated fats, loric and meristic. It is therefore inaccurate to consider coconut oil to contain predominantly MCTs, so you can't extrapolate from MCT studies to coconut oil. That's actually quite a common misconception, that the saturated fat in coconut oil is mainly MCTs. Actually, coconut oil is mainly loric and meristic, which have potent LDL, bad cholesterol, raising effects. Coconut oil should therefore not be advised for people who should or want to reduce their risk of the number one killer of U.S. men and women heart disease. It's like how the beef industry loves to argue that beef fat contains steric acid, a type of saturated fat that doesn't raise cholesterol. Yeah, but it also has palmitic and meristic. That, like loric, does raise cholesterol. If you compare the effects of different saturated fats, yes, steric has a neutral effect on LDL, but palmitic, meristic, and loric shoot it up. And frankly, so may MCT oil itself bumping up LDL like 15% compared to control. So this popular belief, spread by the coconut oil industry, that coconut oil is healthy, is not supported by science. So basically, coconut oil should be treated no differently than animal sources of dietary saturated fat. The latest review, published March 2017 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, put it even more simply in their recommendations for patients. Avoid.