A few years ago, I noticed something odd at the health food store. There, rubbing elbows with the extra virgin olive oil and cold-pressed canola oil was virtually the last fat I expected to see in such esteemed company: coconut oil.
The last time I checked, coconut oil was supposed to be the devil himself in liquid form, with more poisonous artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising, heart-attack-causing saturated fat than butter, lard or beef tallow.
Its bad reputation caused a panic at the concession stands back in 1994, when the Center for Science in the Public Interest put out a study claiming that a large serving of movie-theater popcorn, hold the butter, delivered as much saturated fat as six Big Macs. "Theater popcorn ought to be the Snow White of snack foods, but it's been turned into Godzilla by being popped in highly saturated coconut oil," Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the center, said at the time.
So given all this greasy baggage, what was coconut oil doing in a health food store?
In fact, it has recently become the darling of the natural-foods world. Annual growth of coconut oil sales at Whole Foods "has been in the high double digits for the last five years," said Errol Schweizer, the chain's global senior grocery coordinator.
Backtracking
Two groups have helped give coconut oil its sparkly new makeover. One is made up of scientists, many of whom are backtracking on the worst accusations against coconut oil. And the other is the growing number of vegans, who rely on it as a sweet vegetable fat that is solid at room temperature and can create flaky pie crusts, crumbly scones and fluffy cupcake icings, all without butter.
My curiosity stirred, I brought some home and experimented. I quickly learned that virgin coconut oil has a haunting, nutty, vanilla flavor. It's even milder and richer tasting than butter, sweeter and lighter textured than lard, and without any of the bitterness you sometimes get in olive oil.
Its natural sweetness shines in baked goods and sautes, and is particularly wonderful paired with bitter greens, which soften and mellow under the oil's gentle touch. And the saturated fat in coconut oil makes it a good choice in pastries, whether you avoid animal fats or simply want to pack a little more coconut flavor into that coconut cream pie.
What researchers say
And then there's the science.
According to Thomas Brenna, a professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University who has extensively reviewed the literature on coconut oil, a considerable part of its stigma can be traced to one major factor.
"Most of the studies involving coconut oil were done with partially hydrogenated coconut oil, which researchers used because they needed to raise the cholesterol levels of their rabbits in order to collect certain data," Brenna said. "Virgin coconut oil, which has not been chemically treated, is a different thing in terms of a health risk perspective. And maybe it isn't so bad for you after all."
Partial hydrogenation creates dreaded trans fats. It also destroys many of the good essential fatty acids, antioxidants and other positive components present in virgin coconut oil.
And while it's true that most of the fats in virgin coconut oil are saturated, opinions are changing on whether saturated fats are the arterial villains they were made out to be. "I think we in the nutrition field are beginning to say that saturated fats are not so bad, and the evidence that said they were is not so strong," Brenna said.
Plus, it turns out, not all saturated fats are created equal.
Marisa Moore, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, a nonprofit association of nutritionists, said, "Different types of saturated fats behave differently."
