Coconut oil is not healthy, is it? Everything you need to know about good and bad fats.
“Hey, I just read that coconut oil is actually not good for you at all. Did I buy three jars for nothing last week,” a friend said to me yesterday. Gradually, fortunately, more and more people are finding out that coconut oil is actually not the miracle cure it seems at all, as I also wrote the other day in Foods & Facts #1. Smear it in your hair or on your skin, but especially don't eat too much of it - I always say, because it is full of the wrong fats. With good marketing, companies can tell you anything, but by the end of this article, from now on, you will know all about good and bad fats and pierce through those fancy talk.
What do we actually need fat for?
Fats have acquired a bad image, which sometimes makes people forget that we also desperately need them. For example vitamins A, D, E and K only in fats found, and fats therefore contribute to good eyesight, strong bones, and healthy skin. Also, all your body cells have a thin layer of fat, making them well-protected and flexible. Actually, that fat is quite useful too! But still, it makes a big difference whether you eat a bag of crisps or a piece of salmon. In fact, fats are divided into two categories: you have probably heard of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ fats. Packaging uses different terms for these, namely ‘saturated’ and ‘unsaturated’, and there is a mnemonic to remember which is the good one:
Saturated fat has the V from Wrong
Unsaturated fat has the O from Okay
So unsaturated fats are the good fats, and it is better to consume as little as possible of saturated fats. And you guessed it: saturated fats are mainly found in products like chips, crisps, pizza and chocolate, while unsaturated fats are often found in nuts, fish and seeds. They can also omega 3, 6 and 9 (good for eyes and cardiovascular health) occur only in unsaturated fatty acids.
Now, if you look on the packaging of a jar of coconut oil, you will see that it is full of saturated fats - which means it is actually not good for you at all. Whether it is then organic coconut oil doesn't matter: that only describes about how the coconuts were grown.
When is a fatty acid saturated or unsaturated?
The difference between saturated and unsaturated fatty acids is in their chemical structure. This is a tricky one, but the bottom line is that an unsaturated fatty acid more flexible and your body can therefore use it better for all kinds of processes. Saturated fatty acids are a bit stiffer and therefore actually a bit awkward - your body can't do much with them.
You can also see this difference in products: unsaturated fatty acids are thus flexible and often liquid (like olive oil) and saturated fatty acids are often hard at room temperature (like coconut oil and deep-frying fat).
Yet unsaturated and saturated fatty acids have an important similarity that people sometimes forget: they both provide 9 kilocalories per gram of fat. This means that in both cases: if you eat too much of it, it turns into body fat.
So even though unsaturated fats are good for you, there is a limit to how much of them you can eat - you shouldn't start drinking olive oil from the bottle, for example.
You can think of your body as a car: if you pour petrol in it, you can go for a nice drive. But if you pour in too much, the tank overflows. When that tank ‘overflows’ in your body, you have taken in more fat than you needed and it is converted into body fat - it doesn't matter then whether it was the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ fats.
So it's still tricky, with fats. So always check the label on a product if you are not sure what fats are in it and remember that it is healthier to take unsaturated fats, but as with all food, too much is never good. Still, it is okay to reward yourself every now and then: if you pay attention to what you eat, there is nothing at all wrong with a chip once in a while 🙂 .
