Coconut oil sales have fallen – but I won’t be giving it up

The coconut oil boom may be over, with sales in the UK plummeting 17% – £4.4m – last year. Could the message that it is “pure poison” have sunk in?

Karin Michels, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan school of public health, made that statement last August. Her charge was that this tropical oil, increasingly popular in Europe and the US, is mainly composed of saturated fat, which she believes poses a mortal danger to human health. In July 2017, the American Heart Association issued an advisory notice along similar lines. But I won’t be surrendering the cold-pressed coconut oil that has earned a permanent place in my kitchen. Here’s why.

The institution Michels represents, Harvard TH Chan, is famous for the proposition that saturated fat, which occurs naturally in whole foods, is the dietary devil incarnate.

It was Michel’s predecessors who told us, and continue to tell us, that margarine is more “heart-healthy” than butter. Their advice has coloured “healthy eating” guidelines around the world. Result? We dutifully consumed more trans-fats from hi-tech, ultra-processed margarines and vegetable fats – and they turned out to be decisive life-shorteners.

Still, the school maintains its entrenched dogma, although the latest systematic reviews and meta-analyses of dietary fat evidence have found no statistically significant difference in “all-cause mortality” or deaths from heart disease implicating saturated fat.

The dietary fat guidelines that have prevailed for 40 years, and which supposedly make the case against saturated fat, have belatedly been scrutinised and found lacking. No wonder that they now face vociferous challenge.

Thanks to the anti-saturated-fat crusade, we have been encouraged to drop traditional fats such as butter, lard and dripping and replace them with industrially refined vegetable oils and spreads made from them. Yet a substantial body of scientific research now associates oils of this type with high blood pressure, heart disease and intestinal and liver damage.

Health apart, unrefined (raw, cold pressed, virgin) coconut oil is great for cooking because it is more stable at high temperatures and hard to burn. I love using it for curries, stir-fries and pilau rice. It produces a great crust when frying foods such as fish fillets or things in breadcrumbs and makes brilliant flapjacks and granola. As for the aroma of curry leaves sizzling in coconut oil? Now that’s sublime.