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Is Coconut Oil All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Coconut oil is a celebrity.

At the top of its game and the height of its prominence, coconut oil is being featured in healthy cooking around the world. It is seen in tons of skin products,  promoted as a detoxifier, and spotlighted as a household cleaner.

It has no rival for being a jack-of-all-trade natural food product. In case you haven’t heard or maybe you need a refresher, you can read below or watch the video for some reasons to incorporate coconut oil in your lifestyle...


#1: Helps promote healthy weight loss


Medium chain fatty acids or triglycerides (MCTs) have been shown to help reduce hunger and food cravings. This is a common ingredient found in coconut oil and has been popularized by Dave Asprey in his product Bulletproof Coffee. One of our favorite ways to start the morning, putting some coconut oil (with grass-fed ghee or butter) in your coffee or tea can hold you over to a mid afternoon lunch with good energy and focus. This can help you lose weight and control food cravings.

#2: Antifungal/Antibacterial/Antiviral


Two active ingredients, lauric acid and monolaurin, have been shown to fight off harmful critters such as Staphylococcus Aureus (Staph), Candida, Ringworm, head lice, and Tinea Pedis (Athlete’s Foot). This is a big reason why people use it as a lotion, deodorant or a household cleaner.

#3: Detoxifier


Oil pulling has tremendous benefits. Check out more here.

#4: Promotes healthy cholesterol


Coconut oil has been shown to help improve HDL (good cholesterol) levels and decrease LDL (bad cholesterol) in the blood. This can reduce plaquing which is a major factor in heart disease and strokes.


The hitch...


These reasons and more can be a good push for all of us to incorporate this healthy ingredient, but there are still some drawbacks that we need to take a closer look at…Coconut Oil is a big stimulator of a certain pathway in our immune system (TH-1), which certain nutritionists and health authors would claim as a good thing. The big problem that comes into play is autoimmunity...

Most people have no idea that 1 out of every 4 people have an autoimmune condition. There is an estimated 80-140 diseases that have an underlying autoimmune component and it is one of the top 10 leading causes of death for women under the age of 64. To put it in clear terms, autoimmunity is the biggest problem that you have probably never thought about...

There are many foods that stimulate specific pathways that instead need to be calmed down in people with autoimmune issues and coconut oil is one of those. Simply put, for autoimmune sufferers coconut oil can be like pumping kids full of sugar and giving them squirt guns at a party...they are going to shoot at something...

The majority of people suffering with an autoimmune condition have no idea and blood testing to clarify autoimmunity is not done as much as it should be. As an example, one of the most common autoimmune conditions is Hashimoto’s which is a low thyroid issue. Most doctors treat this with thyroid hormone but it’s actually the immune system that’s the real problem!

Any chronic illness can have an autoimmune component and blood testing can be done to see if your immune system reacts to any tissue or organ in your body. It’s pretty simple when you really think about it.

For autoimmune people it all comes down to balancing the immune system which has many moving parts and is considered at Inside Out Health as the bureaucracy of the human body. If you have never liked coconut oil or maybe you react to it, there is a reason for that. If you are curious and would like to find out more information about autoimmunity please contact our office to get some free resources.

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