Coconut Oil and Abdominal Fat
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"Coconut Oil and Abdominal Fat" I was surprised to see in this popular infographic that there was evidently
promising evidence that coconut oil could
help with obesity. Well, if you pump
the stomachs of rats with purified medium-
chain fatty acids, one component of coconut oil, they end up eating less food, but you don't know if there's
any relevance to humans until you put it to the test. Researchers compared breakfasts
with the same amount of dairy fat, coconut oil fat,
or tallow (beef fat), and no effect on hunger,
fullness, satisfaction, or how much they then went
on to eat at lunchtime.
So where did this whole
idea that coconut fat was somehow different
come from? Well, six years ago, an open-label
pilot study was published. They asked 20 men and women to eat
2 tablespoons of coconut oil a day for a month, and the
men appeared to lose about an inch off their waist. Now open-label means
that the participants knew what they were eating; there
wasn't like some placebo control.
In fact, there was no
control group at all, so you don't know if
the effects would have just happened anyway
without the coconut oil. There's a well-recognized
effect in dietary studies where just being in a dietary
study under observation tends to lead to a
reduction in caloric intake, because you know they're
going to weigh you and looking over your shoulder. But there had never
been a controlled study of coconut oil and waistlines
in men and women until 2015. About a hundred men
and women were given about a tablespoon of coconut
oil a day for three months and lost nearly an inch inch off their waist after three months
compared to control.
What did the control
group get instead? Nothing.
There was no placebo, and so they were comparing doing
something with doing nothing. And when one does that,
there's often a placebo effect regardless of the true
efficacy of the treatment. And they also suggested
the coconut oil group may want to take
their dose with fruit. And if they did end up eating more
fruit, that in and of itself may help, as despite its sugar content,
fruit consumption tends to be associated
with anti-obesity effects. What we need to see if coconut
oil has some special effect is to give people a spoonful of
coconut oil versus some other oil and see if there's any difference.
And when you do that— 2 tablespoons of coconut oil a day versus
2 tablespoons of soybean oil a day— no significant difference in waistlines. But what did happen was a significant
increase in insulin resistance in the coconut oil group, which is what
eventually causes type 2 diabetes, despite being told to increase
fruits and vegetables, cut down on sugars and animal fat,
and despite an exercise program of walking 50 minutes a day,
four days a week.
The only other placebo-controlled
study of coconut oil and waistlines was published in 2017, and no significant changes in weight
or waist or hip measurements, total fat, belly fat,
nor butt fat. No benefit to coconut oil
for obesity over placebo shown in any study to date, so how can coconut oil proponents
get away with saying otherwise? Well, they like to talk
about studies like this, showing that Pacific islanders who ate more traditional
coconut-based diets are slimmer than those
eating more modern diets with fewer coconut products. But guess what they
were eating instead? The modernized dietary pattern
was primarily characterized by high intakes of sausage,
eggs, and processed foods..
