Real Doctor Reacts To Absurd MCT OIL & COCONUT OIL Claims

MCT oil and coconut oil. Are they health food or are they poison? Well it kind of

depends on when you're talking about because for thousands of years it was

just food and many cultures did extremely well. They used coconut cream

and whole coconut and coconut oil and it was just a staple but then about fifty

years ago when fat an especially saturated fat got blamed for heart

disease now everything took a turn so now

coconut oil was the worst of the worst and then a few years ago it made a

comeback and it became a health food and then people started using it for all

sorts of health reasons and ever since then it's kind of bounced around every

year it goes from poison to health food and back and forth and back and forth so

I guess it's this time of year because this month

Canadian CBC News had another report out where they talked about the truth of

coconut oil so today we're going to take a look at that video and comment on some

of those rather absurd claims that were made. Coming right up!

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything. We're setting up shop to talk to shoppers about a big health trend.

Coconut oil. What kind of cooking oil do you use? I do often shop for olive oil

and coconut oil. At home I use a lot of coconut oil.

As a matter of fact, I'm from the Carribean, so we use a lot of coconut oil.

Yeah so this would look familiar to you. Very much so.

the coconut oil industry has exploded raking in over 650 million dollars last year alone.

It sound like these consumers are relatively well-informed they're favoring

natural oils like olive oil and coconut oil and then we have this news team come

in and the reporter sets up shop to teach these shoppers about coconut oil

and the first thing we hear is that they're raking it in six hundred and

fifty million dollars which sounds like a really really big number but how big

is it really. Well let's compare it with margarine margarine is a food that

everyone pretty much agrees that it's the worst of the worst I mean you might

as well eat plastic it's up there with lead poisoning in terms of nutritional

value and even though it has been declining it is still selling four times

as much margarine as coconut oil in the world so it's not an enormous amount and

if we compare it to something like soft drinks it is one six hundredth there's

600 times more sugary drinks sold than coconut oils so if we're gonna focus our

attention on something then let's focus our attention on putting warning labels

and explaining what margarine and soft drinks do but as always in journalism

words are chosen very carefully to invoke feelings so they're inferring

that these are mega companies that are making claims and taking

advantage of people so I just wanted to put that in perspective

MCT oil. That's medium chain triglycerides the wonders of MCT oil and the coconut oil craze are

linked and it all goes back to this 2003 study. Makes you wonder. Is there anything

to all these health claims? To find out we track down the author of the study

that set off the craze. Hi Marie Pierre hi nice to meet you this is the shop all

right would you like a coffee sure all

right two black coffees with coconut oil

please lots of people put coconut oil in their

coffee but this is a first for her we did a research to look at the influence

of MCT oil on energy expenditure and body composition wait what you weren't

testing coconut oil not at all we were testing MCT oil it's very

purified form MCT is a subcomponent of coconut oil and only 15 percent of

coconut oil is MCT what her research did find was a small improvement in weight

loss for overweight people who consumed MCT oil but Zippo on coconut oil. In 2003

there was a study on MCT oil and energy metabolism and the study showed that

there was some effect that MCT oil could be beneficial for weight loss and then

the reporter sits down and talks with the author of that study Marie-Pierre

St. Onge and in the middle of that she goes what the study was about MCT oil

and not coconut oil and then the lady says yes that we studied MCT oil and

they're not the same thing well no news there but what the reporter

is inferring with her surprise and her disdain is that because the study showed

MCT oil was good but it didn't show that coconut oil was good then

coconut oil must be bad right the study didn't say anything about coconut oil

we they are related they are not the same MCT oil if made from coconut oil

but we can't draw any conclusions from that study all it showed was that MCT

oil is good so if they're closely related then maybe there's some benefits

to coconut oil as well but they never even get into that they're just sort of

inferring that well then coconut oil must be bad. Many experts are concerned

that coconut oil is high in saturated fat what if I told you though that one

tablespoon of coconut oil has 13 grams of saturated fat. Yuck. That's more than

two-thirds of your daily saturated fat limit. That's the opposite of healthy.

When we hear something over and over it becomes a truth whether it has any

substance to it or not and we've heard about fat and saturated fat for about 50

years I remember growing up and I thought that fat was yuck exactly like

the guy in the video you just have to hold out a spoon and say saturated fat

and people go yuck and then he added well that's the opposite of healthy this

same person who had for good reasons been purchasing coconut oil in his diet

all he has to do is meet someone holds out something that says saturated fat

and it's like this triggered queued response we need to understand a little

bit more about the foods because otherwise we'll just be like a leaf in

the wind we'll go wherever the wind blows and this week it's something and

next week it's going to be something else so we need to start understanding

these things so let's just spend a few minutes looking at what is coconut oil

and what is saturated fat I'm going to explain that in some more detail as we

go so fatty acids they're chains of carbons they they're carbon by carbon by

carbon linked in a chain and then on the sides they have hydrogen atoms and if

they have one hydrogen atom on each side then they're

called saturated because there's not room for anymore they're saturated with

hydrogen but if something is unsaturated that means that in some places these

carbons are linked together with what's called a double bond two of the links

are used up to unite the carbons and then they only have one bond left over

for a hydrogen so these carbons only have one hydrogen instead of two and

then they're called unsaturated so this bond this double bond could react with

an enzyme or with heat or with oxygen and it could be oxidized it could have a

chemical reaction so that's why unsaturated fats are more sensitive to

oxygen and heat and light and the reason medium chain and short chain

triglycerides are such a big deal the reason they studied them is that they

behave a little bit different depending on how long the chain is caproic acid

has six carbons it's called a short chain so it's not usually included some

MCT oils has about 1% of that in there because they didn't bother taking it out

but medium changed strictly speaking our eight carbon chains or 10 carbon chains

so the shorter they are the faster they can be metabolized and there's two

reasons for this first of all the the shorter they are the quicker the enzymes

can chop them up there's fewer chops to make but the second reason has to do

with our digestion that there's two primary ways that food can be absorbed

from your gut and the first is through the lymph system and the second is

straight into the blood and if it's absorbed straight into the blood then it

goes into through a system called the portal vein and it has to be really

really tiny to get straight into the bloodstream if it's larger the larger it

is the more it is similar to foreign substances like virus and bacteria and

then we need to give our immune system a

chance to work at it and the cutoff is right between ten and twelve carbons

long so the smaller molecules can go straight into the blood the larger ones

have to get into the lymph system first so the reason MCT's are studied and so

popular is they save you a couple of hours that MCT's can be chopped up and

used for energy within minutes whereas the longer ones are gonna take a few

hours so it's not good or bad it just depends on what you're looking for but

if people are trying to get fat adapted if they're carb dependent then it can be

tremendously beneficial to have a faster source of energy and that's why people

use those so coconut oil has about 1% of the six carbon chain

eight percent of the eight carbon chain and about six percent of the ten carbon

chain so it has about 15% of medium chain triglycerides or shorter those are

the ones that qualify that go straight into the bloodstream anything longer is

not going to go straight in the next one lauric acid is kind of in between

lauric acid about 25% of lauric acid goes straight into the bloodstream so it

also qualifies really as an MCT but 75% of it gets absorbed into the lymph and

that's why lauric acid is not considered a medium chain triglyceride and anything

longer is going to take longer to be absorbed it doesn't make them bad it's

just not a medium chain triglyceride anymore

so carbons can get even longer but there's very very few beyond 18 carbons

and this is called stearic acid and this is the way that animals store most of

their fat so humans store stearic acid on their bodies and animals that we eat

store it mostly as stearic acid but coconut oil also contains a couple

more things it has 6% of something called oleic acid which is 18 carbons

long and it has one place where there's a double bond so it is monounsaturated

and of course oleic comes from olive oil so six percent of the fat in coconut oil

is actually the same as the dominant fat in olive oil and then there's just two

percent of linoleic acid which has two places where its unsaturated which makes

it an omega-6 none of these fats are bad none of them are artificial none of them

are synthetic they are just different lengths and coconut is a very unusual

because there's no other product there's no other food on the planet that has

this type of distribution so when they make MCT oil they just separate the

shortest chains so they get about 15% MCT oil

it's a refined product out of the coconut oil and the rest is used for

other purposes they have other nutritive purposes or they can be used for

cosmetics and creams and shampoo and things like that now just a quick point

here that the study they refer to into from 2003 it said that MCT oil had some

benefits for weight loss and they didn't have anything bad to say about MCT oils

but then they went on to say that people are concerned experts are concerned

because coconut oil is so high in saturated fat

well MCT oil separates out the 8 and 10 carbon chains which are fully saturated

they have zero double bonds and therefore MCT oil is a hundred percent

saturated ok so again that doesn't make it bad it's just what it is it's a good

fuel coconut oil however if saturation was what we should judge oils on if

they're good or bad is only 86 percent saturated so from the saturation

perspective then coconut oil would be better.

How does that compare with butter or olive oil? Good question.

It's the same as almost two tablespoons of butter.

All right.

Wow.

Six and a half tablespoons of olive oil okay.

Really?

That's crazy!

And. Wait for it!

Two and a half tablespoons of lard. Lard wow. That's stuff right here. Damn that's

crazy actually. I didn't realize that yeah

Okay. Here you can have this back.

And now she goes through the unveiling process

so she compares she holds out the spoons of coconut oil and says how much

saturated fat that is and it's over your daily limit and then she compares it to

other forms of fat and shows that based on how much saturated fat it's worse

than any other form of fat and people are oohing and aahing and grossing out

along the way because everyone knows how bad fat is so there is no argument here

it's just playing on emotion based on misconceptions based on a myth that

people have bought into but she's not telling them anything new she's just

saying ooh saturated fat and and people just go

along and then she saves the last box for last and she says now hold on here

hold on here drumroll and she lifts it and it's lard all right and again it's

all these connotations that we have there's nothing wrong with any of those

fats I eat them all on a regular basis if I cook bacon I make my own bacon bits

I get lard leftover I save it for cooking when I make my bone broth I get

beef tallow pure saturated fat leftover I save it for cooking because they're

all good and the only thing the reporter uses to back up her story is the fact

that Canada Food Guide and of course also the American USDA are recommending

us to limit our fat intake especially saturated fat now of course the reason

that people are so afraid of fat is that in the back of their minds and

especially saturated fat in the back of their minds they have heart disease

cardiovascular disease because that had been linked at one point most research

in the last ten years have shown the opposite that it's due to inflammation

but of course it takes a couple of generations for people to change their

mind even after the evidence is in but if it's heart disease that were afraid

of let's just look at the track record of the experts food recommendations so

on this scale we have percentage of obesity in the United States and on this

scale we have diabetes incidence in millions so in 1960 we had about 12% of

obesity in 1970 we had about 14-15 in 1980 we had about 17 or so so it was

climbing steadily and what happened in 1980 well a couple of things they came

out with high fructose corn syrup and the government decided to issue some

guidelines to teach people how to eat and they said you should eat sixty

percent of your calories should come from carbohydrates no more than ten percent

should come from saturated fats and no more than ten percent should come from

added sugar so all in all though the vast majority of the calories come from

sugar either added sugar or fruit sugar or milk sugar or lots of other forms of

sugar that are allowed and recommended in the food until they published the

guidelines in 1980 the trend looked kind of like this and after they published

the guidelines and people got really scared of fat now the trend looked like

that so we can't say that there's a causative relationship between the

guidelines and the changing the accelerating trend but we can say for

sure that it didn't help a whole lot either when we look at from 1990 and on

now of course it has exploded and in the last year we had over 40% obesity in the

United States when we look at diabetes we find that if you if you watch some of

my other videos you know that obesity and diabetes are both due to insulin

resistance and the diabetes is just lagging behind 10, 15, 20 years which

matches this graph exactly and we see that in 1960 we had a very small

percentage in 1970 it was increasing by about 2 to 3% per year and it went over 10%

in 1990 and it didn't accelerate as fast as the weight gained because it lags

behind a little bit but then in 2000 2010 2018 it has absolutely exploded and

it's now going even faster trend increase than than the weight gain and

despite this despite the evidence in hand they have not changed more than a

few commas in their food recommendations they still recommend 60 - 65%

carbohydrates three cups a low-fat dairy no saturated fat avoid animal foods

animal fats and the advice is the same over and over and over things are

getting worse and worse and worse but they're just saying hey our guidelines

are correct there based on experts recommendation it's you people who

aren't doing it right and of course as we've talked about in other videos you

can't do it right when you're insulin resistance because your insulin dictates

your hunger but the point of this again is that she's referring to the experts

and here is the result or at least lack of results of listening

to experts so we need to start understanding food rather than just

looking at the last piece of research because this goes back and forth every

year it changes this year coffee is good next year coffee is bad blueberries are

good blueberries are bad chocolate is good chocolate is bad coconut oil who knows

what it's going to be next year unless we start understanding more about the

food so since the biggest hurdle to overcome is our fat phobia and our

saturated fat phobia we need to understand some things about fat why

does the body need fat what is fat good for right so first we talk about

essential fatty-acids those are things that the body needs in very small relatively

small quantities compared to the the food the energy fats and those are the

Omega 3's and the omega 6's and they are essential that means you can't live

without them essential means necessary for life and they help build cell

membranes okay your brain is mostly fat and the cell membranes are mostly a fat

called DHA it's a very long chain six times unsaturated fatty acid that gives

the brain and the neural membrane certain properties of signaling and your

brain can't mature and it can't function and it can't repair itself the brain and

the nervous system if you're deficient in these long-chain omega-3 fatty acids

which essentially come from fish oil you can get some from algae if you're a

vegetarian but primarily they come from fish your body can theoretically make

some from linolenic acid which comes from flax for example but the conversion

is so poor it's like less than 1% for most people so the realistic chance of

getting enough is to take a supplement to eat lots of fish or take it an algae

supplement or something like that but these are essential they're in small

quantities they are signaling their building materials their precursors

thyroid and adrenal function depends on essential fatty acids hormone production

depends on essential fatty acids and regulation of your blood pressure your

liver function your immune system your inflammatory responses all of those

depend on small quantities the right proportions and ratios of these so the

body doesn't burn these these are not for fuel the body uses them for very

very specific purposes we only need a few grams a day of these now all the

other fat is fuel and you store fuel and you burn

fuel any excess fuel that you eat if you eat more carbohydrates or more protein

or more fat or a combination thereof during a period of plenty of food during

a feast period the body is going to store the excess and it doesn't store it

as canola oil it doesn't store it as safflower oil it stores it primarily as

saturated fat and the primary one is going to be a stearic acid the

unsaturated the monounsaturated the polyunsaturated those are for specific

functions they're not for fuel we don't need a lot of those things and the only

ones that we really need are these things that give us EPA and DHA and the

plant oils don't do that the canola and the safflower cannot contribute to your

omega-3s that you need for your brain humans and cows and pigs they store the

excess fuel as fat and we store it as the most effective like a standard form

of fat storage which is a saturated fat so when humans take excess carbohydrates

we store it as saturated fats and then when there's a period of famine we

retrieve we burn the saturated fat that's what saturated fat is its fuel

it's a very efficient way of storing fuel other than that what is it that

makes saturated fat so good and plant fats not so good it is the fact of

stability saturated fats are very stable because the carbon is jam-packed

with hydrogen it's full it is very unlikely to react with anything and this

is why you can leave coconut oil sitting on the counter for a year or two it

doesn't go rancid it doesn't spoil you can keep it in a clear container

right it's probably even better if you keep it in in the fridge in the dark but

it is so stable it is not gonna spoil the extreme opposite is something like

flax oil which is the plant omega-3 that as long as it's inside the flax seed it

protected nature has put a very very tight dark shell on the oils but as soon

as you break it and turn it into oil it goes rancid in minutes to hours you

need to keep that in the freezer right so saturated fats are stable that makes

them an ideal form of food because that's gonna mean that the food is not

rancid it is not spoiled but when we eat a lot of plant oils the polyunsaturated

plant oils like canola and safflower and soybean etc those things oxidize and

they go rancid and they taste terrible so in order to prevent that terrible

taste they refine them and they process them and they deodorize them and they

degum them and they bleach them until there is nothing left and now they have

a tasteless flavorless nutrition free oil that also keeps forever but it's

because they destroyed it so saturated fats are not bad they are bad if you

carry them in your belly around your internal organs and that's part of

metabolic syndrome which is a result of insulin but other than that the only bad

saturated fat is if you eat an animal that wasn't healthy so if you eat meat

then you don't want to go and eat the grain-fed cow that's been pumped full of

hormones and antibiotics and it was so sick that it wouldn't have lasted

another three months before they turned it into hamburger right you want to eat

something that had a normal life just like the lion hunts the antelope that

antelope was healthy and free until it became food that's what our meat needs

to be as well if it's healthy then it's healthy for you if it's sick

then it's gonna make you sick

We tell Health Canada about the industry's

claims and we learn our government is planning to put warnings on foods high

in saturated fat someday if the proposal gets passed

In the meantime these shoppers have a message.

Do you think there should be a warning to consumers

about how much saturated fat is in something like this? 100%

Why? Because I did I didn't I had no clue.

So the saturated fat is on the label but

should there be a warning? Yeah. Cause i guess it feels like they're just not

putting it explicitly on the people. Until that happens.

Are you gonna keep on using coconut oil? For certain things yes for other things probably take a step

back and look at either canola or I mean lard in this case I guess.

No not not today not tomorrow not ever.

I don't know if I want to laugh cos' it's so

ridiculous or if I want to cry because it's so tragic but Canada is apparently

planning to put warning labels on food based on their saturated fat content

right in the US they put heart healthy on cereals full of sugar and grain the

most inflammatory foods producing heart attacks and metabolic syndrome and

that's heart healthy the food labeling is so misguided and so misleading and

focusing on all the wrong things and now they're just gonna take it one step

further and put another barrier between us and healthy foods such as grass-fed

beef and grass-fed butter and coconut oil as for the shoppers in the video

weren't they lucky to have their lifestyle improved by a reporter who

came in and taught them the truth about coconut oil so one of the guys who had

been on the right track now he said I'm gonna have to rethink what I'm doing I'm

probably gonna have to cut back on coconut oil and start using more canola

oil like we said polyunsaturated rancid

processed omega-6 inflammatory the list goes on and on and on so weren't they

lucky to get lectured by that reporter the reason I want to comment on videos

like this is that they're so skillful but they're not based on anything

they're very very good at editing and shooting and presenting things in a way

that's very convincing that's very emotional that's very provoking but the

only two arguments they made in the entire thing was that coconut oil is bad

because it's not MCT oil which was studied in the 2003 study and that

coconut oil must be bad because it has saturated fats so I do the videos the

way I do because I want people to understand a little bit more if you just

have the basics if you just know 1 2 3 this is what I'm supposed to do then

you're gonna hear something new every day and you're gonna change your mind

every day because we're just bombarded with information and misinformation but

if you start understanding the basics if you start understanding the properties

of food why saturated food is good its fuel it's stable why polyunsaturated can

be good because they have certain information properties that the body

needs that the body uses these for building blocks and information and uses

the other fat for fuel and the unsaturated fats that we need are for

information they don't come from the polyunsaturated plant foods they're very

very different okay they have nothing to do with each other so if you start

understanding a little bit more then you're not going to just be like a leaf

in the wind and change your mind every five minutes and you can start making

some good decisions for yourself and your family if you enjoyed this video

then make sure you check out that one and that one thanks so much for watching

and I'll see you next time