Published by Piccadilly Books, Ltd.

Dr. Bruce Fife a.k.a. “Dr. Coconut” answers questions about coconut, diet, and nutrition.

I’ve tried looking for studies on coconut oil on the Internet and elsewhere and have not found much. Are there many studies on coconut? If so, where do I look?

There are literally thousands of studies. I list references to hundreds of them in my books. However, if you tried to find studies using only the words “coconut oil” you may have only limited success.

Coconut oil has been condemned as an “artery clogging” saturated fat for so long that many people are skeptical about it being one of the “good” fats or having all of the benefits I talk about in my books. These people need convincing. Simply saying that coconut oil doesn’t promote heart disease isn’t enough to convince them of its innocence. They need proof. Published medical studies help supply this proof.

When people ask for studies my first response is to refer them to my books and have them check the studies listed in the back. These people can look these studies up and read them for themselves if they want. The information comes from various sources including: PubMed (an Internet database of medical studies), published and unpublished studies not listed in PubMed, historical records, technical manuals and books (such as those published by the American Oil Chemists’ Society), and personal communication with researchers and others.

Some people want more proof or more definitive studies. Many will look for studies themselves and discover that finding information can be difficult. The problem is that most studies regarding the health aspects of coconut oil are not always easy to find or to decipher.

For the past 30 years there have been few studies published specifically on the health benefits of coconut oil. There have actually been thousands of studies involving coconut oil, but most of these weren’t evaluating coconut oil specifically. The oil was only used for comparative purposes. On the surface, these studies may appear to be worthless in regards to coconut oil’s health benefits, but in fact they provide a wealth of information if you know what to look for.

Because of prejudice against coconut oil and other saturated fats, few researchers dared to do studies to evaluate any benefit to coconut oil. Getting funding to study the benefits of coconut oil was impossible. Saturated fat was a dietary villain and the popular thing to do was to design studies to prove how bad it was, not its usefulness. Funding institutions and big businesses weren’t about to throw money away on what they considered worthless research. So for the past three decades very few studies were conducted to demonstrate the health benefits of coconut oil.

That does not mean that there wasn’t any research going on specifically with coconut oil. Coconut oil research continued but in a more clandestine fashion. Researchers just gave the oil a different name and got funding that way. This proved to be very successful. Instead of saying the words “coconut oil” they used the terms “medium chain triglyceride” (MCT) oil or “medium chain fatty acid”. They even studied individual medium chain fatty acids such as lauric acid, capric acid, caprylic acid that their monoclyberides (monolaurin, monocaprin, and monocaprylin). Consequently, a great deal of research was done on coconut oil and its component parts. Financiers providing the money had no idea that these substances came from coconut oil and that they were funding research that would one day provide the groundwork demonstrating the many healthy benefits of coconut oil. Today, if you do a search for coconut oil you find only a limited number of studies, but if you search for “lauric acid”, “medium chain triglycerides”, or some other term associated with coconut oil you will come up with thousands of studies.

PubMed is an Internet database created as a means for researchers to quickly access a large numbers of studies on particular subjects. You can go to it at www.pubmed.org. Here you can find a wealth of information on coconut—if you know how to look for it.

If you entered the words “coconut oil” you will come up with 1087 studies as of March 30, 2006 (the date I am writing this article). Studies are continually being added each week and each month as new research is published.

Most of the entries on PubMed only include an abstract. An abstract is a brief summary of the study that is only a paragraph or so long. So you have to obtain the entire article to really understand what the study says. The conclusions given in abstracts aren’t necessarily accurate or unbiased so you need to read the entire study for the facts.

Although PubMed lists over one thousand studies involving coconut oil, if you look at these studies you will find that not all of them say much of interest about coconut oil. That’s one of the reasons why some people become frustrated when they research coconut oil. Most of the studies actually involve other substances and coconut oil is only included for comparative purposes. Many of these studies give little useful information about the health aspects of coconut oil. However, some can be very valuable, but you have to dig deeper and read between the lines.

An example of this is a study that I ran across while writing this article. It’s titled “Dietary habits, plasma polyunsaturated fatty acids and selected coronary disease risk factors in Tanzania.” You would not suspect that it includes information about coconut oil, but it does. Although the study was focused on comparing heart disease risk factors and fish oil consumption, it included some interesting information about coconut oil. In the study it was found that among three populations studied, the one that consumed the highest amount of fish oil had the lowest risk factors for heart disease. What the study also showed, but the authors did not elaborate on because they were focused on the fish oil, is that this same population also consumed the largest amount of coconut oil. So was the low risk of heart disease really due to the fish or was it to the coconut oil? The study doesn’t address this issue. But the author’s suggestion that fish oil was the reason for the lower risk is just as valid for coconut oil. It is interesting how researchers pick and choose how to present their data in order to support their personal beliefs or the position of their sponsors.

So even though many of the studies don’t seem to say much about coconut oil, if you read them carefully they can provide some interesting information. The number of studies available are actually much greater than the 1087 found under the term “coconut oil.” If you broaden your search to “coconut” you get an additional 2037 studies. “Coconut milk” and “coconut water” add another 395 studies. Since coconut oil is composed predominately of medium chain fatty acids or medium chain triglycerides (also spelled medium-chain triglycerides in the database) you should use these key words as well. Other key words include lauric acid, capric acid, caprylic acid, monoglycerides, monolaurin, monocaprin, moncaprylin, Lauricidin, MCT, and MCFA. If you do a search using all of these words you end up with a total of 16,193 studies! That’s an impressive number of studies relating to coconut oil. Because key words may be used in more than one study, some of these studies will be duplicated, but still the number is probably well over 10,000. So there are many studies on coconut oil, you just need to know where to look and how to dig useful information out of the articles.