One of the biggest tragedies of our time concerning diet and health is the mistaken belief that coconut oil is a dietary villain that causes heart disease. The reality is that it may be one of the best things you can eat to help protect you from hart disease. Instead of being a villain, as it is often made out to be, it is really a saint. By eating coconut oil you can reduce your chances of suffering a heart attack!
WHY HAS COCONUT OIL BEEN VICTIMISED?
It is well documented the people of the pacific Islands who live on traditional diets, consisting largely of Coconuts and Taro, have exceptionally good health with very little instance of hart disease. It is not until they became exposed to western diets that heart disease and obesity became a problem.
Why is it then that coconut oil, which makes up a large part of their diet, has come to be seen in the west as a dietary villain? The simple answer here relates to politics and money.
During the 1980’s the American Soybean Association (ASA), for self serving reasons, set up a campaign to notify the public about the health risks of coconut and palm oil, which are classed as saturated fats. As a result of this campaign the market for coconut oil all but dried up, while companies selling vegetable oils profited from a larger share of the market. The losers here were the consumers, and the small island nations, who relied on the export of coconut oil for their livelihoods.
This campaign against coconut oil has greatly affected the people of the Pacific Islands. The farming of coconuts, and the extraction of coconut oil, has long been a major money earner for people living in rural areas. Without it younger members of the communities which relied on the coconut oil industry were forced to move to larger industrialised areas to look for work.
It seemed that the coconut oil industry had become obsolete with foreign markets choosing to use highly processed vegetable oils, such as corn and soybean oils instead of the more pure coconut oil they had been using previously. This has changed now due to a growing awareness that the bad press that coconut oil has received is simply not true.
New technology has also aided in the rebirth of the coconut oil industry in rural communities.
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