Coconut oil is not poison

coconut oil
Time for another jar!

I love coconut oil. It goes everywhere in me and on me. I make deodorant with it, use it as a deep conditioner for my hair, put it in my secret recipe for frizz-taming ‘beach hair’ spray, use it as a moisturiser, to treat thrush, to groom my eyebrows, to soothe minor scrapes… 

I also cook with it – OMG! Apparently the worst thing you can do, ‘pure poison’ according to some Harvard bod. Cue the coconut oil brigade (including me) getting all indignant, and the general media’s glee at the chance tromp all over another thing those superfood lovers think is so great.

Lots of irritating articles and fence-sitting from nutritionists later, I read a decent report in i where it was concluded that two tablespoons a day would smash through your recommended saturated fat levels. Well, duh. It’s 86% saturated fat.

Do they think we’re all completely brainless? If you eat coconut oil, you most likely do it because you’ve heard about various alleged health benefits and/or you like the taste. But you are not a moron. You know that it’s fat, and you’re not going to eat two tbsp a day. I’d bloody struggle to! I can happily use a teaspoon to make my eggs (yum), and if I’m tracking my calories at the time, in it goes. I eat it all the damn time, and I’m not fat, thanks (I also don’t have a cholesterol problem – if you did, it’d be off the table along with a lot of other stuff).

Leave coconut oil alone, and all the other glorious rainbow of ingredients native and exotic that people into health, fitness and just variety like to incorporate as part of their lives. Focus instead on the twpsyn who eats Maccy D two, three times a week and thinks nothing of ten pints of cider (aka ten doughnuts’ worth of sugar) Friday and Saturday night.

Rant over 😀

PS: Coconut oil is just one thing; I could write this same post about clean eating, or how Deliciously Ella is often attacked, or the recent ‘probiotics labelled quite useless’ reports (oh yes? Deduced from a trial where they looked at a full 25 people?!). This is more a post about the way the media seizes headlines and buries the actual science, and the ‘boring’ bits where experts say it’s actually fine, in sensible amounts.

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