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| The sweet truth about coconuts |
| Anand Sankar / New Delhi Sep 13, 2009, 00:59 IST |
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 After all the fuss about olive oil, now it’s the turn of coconut oil. A team of Australian scientists now claim that adding a dash of coconut oil to your diet will help in combating diabetes.
Coconut oil, widely consumed in many parts of India, is said to contain a large amount of medium-chain fatty acids which help in reducing the body’s resistance to insulin. The medium-chain fatty acids, it is said, are more suited for energy use rather than fat storage, unlike oils consisting of long-chain fatty acids, which decrease the body’s ability to absorb blood sugar and exacerbate insulin (insulin affects the amount of glucose absorbed by the liver) resistance and diabetes. Obesity and insulin resistance are major factors leading to the onset of Type 2 diabetes.
The researchers, Nigel Turner and Jiming Ye, from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, compared fat metabolism and insulin resistance in mice-fed coconut oil and lard-based diets. They divided the rodents into two groups, feeding one group a diet rich in coconut oil and the other, a lard-based diet. The researchers say that the lard-based diet used in mice was exactly like that followed by people in the Western world.
“The medium-chain fatty acids, like those found in coconut oil, are interesting to us because they behave very differently to the fats normally found in our diets,” said study leader Turner. “Unlike the long-chain fatty acids contained in animal fats, medium-chain fatty acids are small enough to enter mitochondria — the cell’s energy burning powerhouses — directly where they can then be converted to energy.”
The coconut oil consumption also affects fat storage in the body, the study says. Fat storage is determined by the balance between how much fat is taken in by cells and how much of this fat is burned for energy. Thus, adding coconut oil to the diet aids weight loss and increases the body’s metabolism.
But coconut oil does come with a warning. The exclusive use of medium-chain fatty acids can lead to fat build-up in the liver which could lead to its malfunctioning. The scientists instead recommend mixing in consumption of fish oils. Fish oils, it is believed, have fatty acids that improve fat oxidation in the liver.
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