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"The worst moment in life is the moment you lose
faith in your dreams. Never let it happen."
- DR. Michael Colgan
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Coconut Oil
Don’t allow your self to get mislead!
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>> click-here to print
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There has been a lot of hype recently about coconut oil and I have been receiving a lot of questions on the hotline about our thoughts on coconut oil.
Coconut oil was used extensively in prepackaged foods along with palm oil. Both were used heavily in margarines. They were cheap and in plentiful hired
to find good things to say about coconut oil to increase sales. If you type in coconut oil in your search engine it will bring up a lot of sites with good things
to say about coconut oil. I encourage you to read the articles and then check out the references that follow the articles. You will find the references are in
short supply, have not been published to go to the National Library of Medicine’s site (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). Again search “coconut oil”. I did. There is
not one published paper showing any benefits for consuming coconut oil, except if you are on parenteral nutrition (feeding tube) and you need basic
information on fats.
The Two Essential Fats
The human body is brilliant at making fat. As dieters know only too bitterly, it can make a barrel of bodyfat out of any food you eat — carbohydrates,
proteins, or fats. It can even turn hormones like insulin into fat.2 It’s a fat manufacturing plant par excellence! But there are two fats your body cannot
make, linoleic acid (omega-6) and alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3).3 As the US National Academy of Sciences states in its handbook of Recommended Dietary
Allowances (RDA), you must obtain these essential fats from your food.3, 4 Almost all your omega-6 fats come from vegetable oils. So do your omega-3
fats, except for the omega-3s in fish oils. Meats and dairy foods contain only miniscule amounts of essential fats. Living omega-6 and omega-3 fats are
essential for oxygen uptake, regulation of blood pressure, formation of hemoglobin and insulin metabolism. Paradoxically, they are also essential for
maintaining a low level of bodyfat. Even more important, they are the raw materials you need to make all the special fats in the structure of your brain,
eyes, ears, testes, ovaries, adrenals, and in the membranes that surround and protect every cell in your body. Without these two essential fats in your
diet, you gradually become a decaying blob of flesh, progressively losing the ability to think, see, hear, reproduce, or even move a muscle.3,4 Whenever
your dietary supply of essential fats becomes inadequate, your body starts to degenerate towards that blob.
Fats Store the Life Force
To know whether you are getting the right fats, you have to be able to distinguish the living from the dead. To do so, you have to know a little about the
life force that animates all living things. Every second of life, your body has to burn fuel in the mitochondria, the “furnaces” of your cells, to release energy.
The moment this process stops, energy disappears and you die. The energy is the life force. When you burn carbohydrates or proteins as fuel,
oversimplified college textbooks will tell you that they release about four calories of energy per gram. When you burn fats, they release more than twice
as much energy, about nine calories per gram. Fats are your most concentrated source of the life force. Calories, however, are just a measure of the heat
produced when you burn foods in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. This crude device makes no distinction between one fat and another. “Burning
calories” in your body, is just a schoolboy description for an incredibly complex process of electron exchange between food and your flesh, a process that
differs radically for every different form of fat.
What Are Living Fats?
What we are really talking about starts to become clear when you ask, where does all our energy come from? It comes from the sun. To dip into a
smidgeon of physics, courtesy of my late mentor, Nobel Laureate, Dick Feynman, every particle of stored energy in foods is the end result of plant growth.
The electromagnetic field of the electrons in the unsaturated fats of living plants attracts and captures photons, particles of sunlight. By combining these
particles with carbon dioxide from the air, plus the gas nitrogen and a miniscule amount of minerals extracted from the soil, plants build their structure. All
plants are containers for the life force. The foods you eat, including meat and dairy foods, which grow from the plants the animals ate, are all storehouses
for the life force from sunlight. The two essential fats, linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid are the most concentrated and the most biologically active form
of storage. If, and only if, these fats are alive and well, as they are in fresh, unprocessed, organicallygrown vegetable oils, then electron exchange can
occur freely to transfer the stored life force to your flesh. This specific transfer of light energy from essential fats enables you to build and maintain your
brain, your eyes, many parts of your organs, and the membranes that surround and protect every cell in your body. It also releases the life force, as raw
energy, which enables you to think, feel, move and continue to live. If your body fails to maintain that flow of energy, you die in about eight seconds. So
you can see that anything which interferes with energy transfer from food to your flesh is detrimental to life. Essential fats are easily killed. They are as
biologically active as the living plant they come from. They interact with everything. So, if you separate them from the living plant system, and expose them
to light, heat or air, they quickly go rancid. In attempting to prevent rancidity, and to “improve” color, taste, smell, and shelf life mass production of
vegetable cooking oils and margarines destroys their essential biological activity.5 Even free-range livestock, who eat the essential fats from living plants,
convert what they do not use into dead saturated fats which we then eat. Your body cannot exchange electrons freely with these dead fats, so access to
the life force is inhibited, and life and health inevitably decline.5
We Are Deficient In Essential Fats
Even the conservative RDA handbook recommends a daily intake of about six grams of linoleic acid and two grams of alpha-linolenic acid. That makes your
requirement for essential fats larger than for any of the vitamins or minerals.4
These RDA recommendations came out in 1989. Since then, new evidence recommends an even larger daily requirement. Very few of us get it. My book,
The New Nutrition, documents the progressive degradation and over-processing of our food, which, among other sins, has destroyed most of the living
fats that used to be part of our diet.1,5 Various researchers estimate that up to 80% of all Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders are
now suffering from deficiencies of essential fats.6,7
Say No to Saturated Fats
There is a major difference between essential fats and all other fats. Let’s think of these fatty acid chains as buses. Saturated fats have no empty seats
on the bus. Essential fats and other unsaturated fats have a number of empty seats on their buses. These empty seats allow these fats to move
substances around your body. For example, essential fats transfer oxygen from the alveoli of the lungs to the hemoglobin of the red blood cells. Then
when the hemoglobin passes by a cell that needs the oxygen, the essential fat that is part of the cell membrane structure, takes the oxygen out of the
hemoglobin and puts it into the cell. Only essential fatty acids can do this. Unlike saturated fats, essential fats are not stored as bodyfat and do not
increase bodyfat. Saturated fats also have no repelling electromagnetic charges, so the sticky molecules of saturated fats group together readily in
parallel lines like matchsticks, to form compact clots. They are solid or semi-solid at room temperature. It takes the heat of a cook stove to agitate the
molecules sufficiently, so they bounce off each other and create spaces between them. With the same number of molecules taking up more space, the
solid clot cannot hold together, and lard melts into liquid.
At 98.6F (37C), your body temperature isn’t high enough to keep saturated fats liquid. Palmitic acid, for example, the main saturated fat in butter and
beef, remains solid until it reaches 145F (63C). So in your arteries, it sticks to everything.
One result is that your blood platelets become sticky and easily form into clots. Another result is the build-up of damaging lumps of fat throughout your
organs. Unless burned immediately for fuel, saturated fat forms deposits in your body like clinker or gunk in a furnace, infiltrating your heart, liver and
brain.1
This accumulation of clinker or gunk is silent and without symptoms, until it emerges as full-blown disease. For more than one-third of its victims, the first
and only symptom they experience is a fatal heart attack.8 Saturated fat diseases were rare in ancient times when meat and dairy foods formed only a
small part of the usual diet. In Western countries today, they are a man-made plague, created by the greed of meat and dairy industries, and the
ignorance and corruption of our medical authorities. For nearly a century, manufacturers and regulators alike have used the most sophisticated
promotional gambits to foist excess saturated fat on human systems never designed to cope with it.
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So now we know why we don’t want to eat saturated fats, lets look at the
Flaxseed oil: 14% omega-6; 54% omega-3; 23% mono-unsaturated; 9% saturated.
Soybean oil: 44% omega-6; 11% omega-3; 30% mono-unsaturated; 15 saturated.
Olive oil: 12% omega-6; 0% omega-3; 72% mono-unsaturated; 16% saturated.
Palm oil: 9% omega-6; 0% omega-3; 44% mono-unsaturated; 48% saturated.
Coconut oil: 4% omega-6; 0% omega-3; 8% mono-unsaturated; 88% saturated.
Leave the coconut oil on the shelf and let the growers find another use for their oil that does not involve destroying your health. It does seem to make a
good ingredient for hair shampoo, a use that will not damage your health. Our small island here in British Columbia now has a truck fueled by vegetable oil
belonging to the local recycler. He is using recycled oil from deep fryers, but coconut oil would work just as well. We suggest the coconut growers look at this
as a nice way for them to make money, save the environment and save your health, all at the same time.
References:
1. Colgan M. The New Nutrition: Medicine For The Millennium. Vancouver: Apple
Publishing, 1994.
2. Colgan M. Your Personal Vitamin Profile. New York: William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 1982.
3. Horrobin DF. Essential fatty acids: a review. In Horrobin DF, (ed). Clinical Use of
Essential Fatty Acids. London: Eden Press, 1982.
4. Recommended Dietary Allowances, 10th Edition. Washington DC: National
Academy Press, 1989.
5. Kabara J. Pharmacological Effects of Lipids, Volume I,II,III. Champaign, IL:
AOCS, 1978,1985,1989.
6. Murray MT, Beutler J. Understanding Fats and Oils. Encinitas, CA: Progressive
Health Productions, 1996.
7. Galli C, Simopoulos AP. Dietary Omega-3 and Omega-6 Fatty Acids. New York:
Plenum Press, 1988.
8. Kuller L, et al. Circulation, 1966;34:1056.
9. Colgan M. Essential Fats For Athletes. Vancouver, BC: Apple Publsihing, 1998.
Colgan Institute News
April 2005 © Colgan Institute, 2005
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Colgan Institute News
April 2005 © Colgan Institute, 2005
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Copyright 2011 Precision Fitness Systems ~ All rights reserved.
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