Going (coco)nuts: A Harvard professor calling coconut oil 'pure poison' is just nuts

So, coconut oil is ‘pure poison’? Hold my beer... erm, my coconut laddoo.

Not that we were looking for poison on the Internet. But then, all of a sudden, the Internet found its 'poison' as a 50-minute talk of Dr Karin Michels, Harvard University, on ‘Coconut Oil and Other Nutritional Errors’ went viral.

In her speech, which is in German, she reportedly used the word ‘poison’ thrice. (We can just hope that nothing was lost in translation). The speech was posted in July, on July 10, to be specific.

We are not sure why it took almost a month to go viral thereafter. A case of slow poison, maybe!

The internet is a strange place. If you randomly look up on the Internet why your left eye is twitching, it will give you a list of probable diseases, so frightening that your right eye too will start twitching.

But then, this pearl of ‘pure poison’ is not a result of random Internet browsing. This came from a professor of epidemiology at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. She is also the Director of the Institute for Prevention and Tumor Epidemiology at the University of Freiburg.

So, this must be true! (Or so the MNCs backing canola oil, sunflower oil and olive oil wish!)

A lot of Harvard professors must be addressing similar issues quite often in many of their talks. But nothing works better than a health scare on the Internet.

And so, it worked like magic, and the Internet is now flooded with videos, news, views and explanations about this new-found 'poison'.

Our very own nariyal ke tel.

Of course, it is not that we Indians, including those belonging to the southern states, wake up to down a glass of coconut oil every morning. This is used as cooking oil for some dishes, like in many other countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, etc.

Also, we massage our hair with coconut oil and we are quite used to drinking coconut water and scoping out the creamy kernel, apart from making full-on desserts with coconut. We may use coconut milk in various preparations too. All this happens because coconut is a local produce to us. Unlike avocado, which requires acquired knowledge to understand when it is ripe enough for consumption, the coconut is pretty simple, accessible and has been around in Asian and Indian culture and tradition for ages.

But, interestingly, our grandparents never taught us the recipe of bullet coffee (meant for the Keto diet or whatever!) with a spoon of coconut oil. Or, they did not force us to gargle with coconut oil to get whiter teeth and apparently way better oral health. They never even told us that coconut oil will make us slim (they never wanted us to be so slim either).

These are things we involuntarily learnt from the Internet, given the hypochondriacs and the image-conscious types we are. And now, we are shuddering at the very thought of the 'poison store' we have made out of ourselves.

The entire debate involves a complex discussion about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

Delving deep into it is just futile because another article at another convenient time will have you believe that all cholesterols are good. To make a long debate short, what Michels told us has nothing new in it (apart from the poison part).

Coconut oil contains more than 80 per cent saturated fat, more than other cooking oils, which apparently has links to heart health (there are reports contrary to that also).

The American Heart Association (AHA) raised an alarm last year, busting the myth of the coconut’s all-healing capacity. There was a counter-attack, under a headline which read along the lines of, "Why coconut oil will not kill you. But listening to the American Heart Association might!" Then, we were told that the counterattack was run by a coconut oil company.

Didn’t the same thing happen to ghee?

Didn’t we make space in our kitchens for ‘apparently healthy’ vegetable oil, junking our very own ghee, only to discover, a decade later, that cafes in western countries have found innumerable health benefits of ‘clarified butter’?

Isn’t turmeric latte just a pricier version of our desi haldi-doodh?

These are some examples Indian nutritionists are raising to counter the ‘anti-coconut campaign’ spewing venom on social media.  

Coconut - Superfood or poison? The golden rule is - if it has been consumed in your region for ages and has multiple and varied uses, its a superfood. For more details, read my answers from last year's controversy on coconut - https://t.co/o64MNhU6n5

— Rujuta Diwekar (@RujutaDiwekar) August 23, 2018

So, whom do we believe?

Clearly, there can be no end to this debate. And, every day, we will learn something old, and unlearn something new, and vice versa, all over again.

Even milk has been healthy all these days — until very recently when it has been linked to bloating, leading to some faddish dairy-free diet.

So, where do we go now?

Today’s superfood is tomorrow’s villain.

Can we just survive on air?

No, it has PM 2.5.

Also read: Include these seven minerals in your food to ensure a balanced diet