Should We Be Nuts for Coconut Oil?
I was 18 years old the first time I saw someone using coconut oil—and it wasn’t in the kitchen. One evening I had entered my college friend’s dorm room and was greeted with the sweet smell of what I thought was suntan oil. Now it was September in Massachusetts, so I thought it odd…especially since my friend was a very dark skinned African-American! There Leslie sat, on her bed, carefully smoothing coconut oil through her long locks. When I asked “what for”, she told me that it supplied much needed moisture to her hair allowing it to remain silky smooth in between chemical straightening processes. It would be nearly two decades later before I’d encounter another use for coconut oil: cooking.
Today, coconut oil is still utilized by people to make both their skin and their hair “glow”. But where it truly shines, I believe, is in the kitchen. This nutritious, white, waxy paste is unusual in that it’s a solid at room temperature, whereas most healthy oils are liquid at room temperature (olive, avocado, etc.). Its solid form makes it easy to scoop just the right amount from the jar. Go ahead and use it in place of butter when baking, roasting, and sautéing. It adds great flavor to any food it is paired with.
While coconut oil is indeed 90% saturated fat, half of that fat is lauric acid which has been shown in multiple scientific studies to reduce waist circumference and BMI measurements, improve the blood’s lipid profile*, and even improve Type 2 diabetes—and potentially Alzheimer’s diseases.
My favorite way to use coconut oil is to add it to the cooking process of brown rice. I must say that I smiled broadly when I read a study which found that when you cook brown rice with some coconut oil (1 tsp per ½ cup of dry rice) and then refrigerate it for 12 hours, and reheat, the starches in the rice change in such a way that your body is unable to digest a good portion of it. This leads to decreased sugar absorption into your bloodstream which in turn causes the portion of rice you consume to contain only half its original calories!