Chris Masterjohn's Take On The Recent AHA Recommendations About Coconut Oil

[Mage]

I don't know if someone's already posted this here, but I thought it was worth sharing! Masterjohn breaks down the whole American Heart Association's recent meta analysis and recommendations about coconut oil and its flaws:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/2017/06/24/coconut-oil-killing-us/

Most of what he's said is in agreement with Peat, which means:



(I really wanted to use this emoji, hahaha)

 

[paymanz]

Thanks for sharing:)

 

[johnwester130]

.........so I should take my coconut oil out of the bin and start using it again ?

 

[paymanz]

.........so I should take my coconut oil out of the bin and start using it again ?

Maybe you have to use it in moderation!

 

[Mage]

.so I should take my coconut oil out of the bin and start using it again

I've listened to the entire podcast, and even though it's 1:30 long, I suggest you to do the same, it's very detailed and interesting.

IMHO Coconut Oil fats are superior even to animal saturated fats, but moderation, as always, is key!

I think that a low fat intake is optimal, and I think most people here agree with it, for various reasons, one of them is saving more space for carbs and cranking up your metabolism, but some fat is good for absorbing fat soluble vitamins and reaping some other minor benefits. But as you eat more and more fat, it gets harder to maintin pufa low!

 

[Xisca]

Very good in coffee!
Also on the skin, especially with aloe vera....

I do not take refined but odourless yes!

In the pacific they use it to fight fungi in food or on the skin. It is the fat for cooking with a wok and getting healthy food in hot humid areas.
More lauric acid than in mothers' milk!

 

[tankasnowgod]

.........so I should take my coconut oil out of the bin and start using it again ?

I don't understand why you would have thrown it away in the first place. The American Heart Association has no credibility whatsoever. I wouldn't believe anything they say without independently verifying it myself.

 

[johnwester130]

I don't understand why you would have thrown it away in the first place. The American Heart Association has no credibility whatsoever. I wouldn't believe anything they say without independently verifying it myself.

okay

 

[tankasnowgod]

okay

Well, if they have a colorful photo, then that changes EVERYTHING!

 

[damngoodcoffee]

Well, if they have a colorful photo, then that changes EVERYTHING!

 

[Mage]

@johnwester130 You didn't even listen to the podcast.. did you?

 

[johnwester130]

@johnwester130 You didn't even listen to the podcast.. did you?

I read the transcript

same thing

 

[Mage]

And your counter-arguement is a colorful picture? Please bring evidence!

A very interesting part of the transcript:

So first of all, although the purpose of randomizing is to equally distribute the confounding variables, known and unknown, between the treatment groups, that’s only successful when the trial is large enough. And this trial was fewer than a thousand people, wasn’t large enough for randomization to successfully equilibrate the number of smokers between the different groups.

And so as a result, the control group, the group getting the saturated fat, had twice as many heavy smokers and 60% more moderate smokers, whereas the experimental group, the polyunsaturated fat group got more light smokers and more non-smokers. And this is really important because smoking contributes to heart disease.

And one of the ways that smoking contributes to heart disease is by contributing to oxidative stress. One of the ways that smoking contributes to oxidative stress is to oxidize vitamin E and cause it to be depleted from the body.

We don’t know exactly the mix of oils that was in the LA Veterans Administration Hospital Study. We know that the control group got a lot of animal fat, we know some of it was butter, we know some of it was not animal fat but rather hydrogenated plant oils, but we don’t know the proportions.

What we do know is that the diet was very poor in vitamin E even compared to what it would have been if the subjects were consuming commercial run-of-the-mill butter as their main fat. Three times lower in vitamin E than what they would have gotten from regular old, commercial butter, let alone something more nutritious, like grass-fed butter. And smoking increases the turnover of vitamin E and makes you need more of it. They were smoking more and getting less of it.

Well, the authors of this study published an analysis where after the main analysis, they came out and they displayed the heart disease data according to cigarette smokers. And what they found was that all of the excess heart disease related deaths occurred in people who were smoking more than ten cigarettes per day and eating the control diet that was really poor in vitamin E.

So when you look at that, it’s very reasonable to look at that trial and say the reason that heart disease was lower on the polyunsaturated fat diet is because in the control diet, cigarette smoking was depleting vitamin E and causing oxidative stress. The diet was really poor in vitamin E and really poorly equipped to protect against the effect of smoking. Therefore, it caused vulnerability and allowed that greater amount of cigarette smoking to contribute to heat disease. That’s a totally reasonable interpretation.

What’s scary about that trial is that smoking also causes cancer, and yet cancer was rising in the polyunsaturated fat group. So something about replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats seems to contribute worse to cancer than cigarette smoking.

So before you come out and make a national recommendation to—or I should say, before you come out and reinforce a decades-old national recommendation to replace saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats, we should discuss this deeply concerning potential for that recommendation to contribute to the risk of cancer.

 

[DaveFoster]

okay

The irony lies in the fact that fully-hydrogenated oils are probably least likely to cause cancer.