palm (oil) sunday

The War over Tropical Oils

In case you missed it, my wife Judy, author of 1521: Rediscovering the History of the Philippines, took to Instagram today to post in celebration of her favorite palm, the coconut, including this catchy tune:

First, I hope you’ll consider giving her a follow. Second, good luck getting that song out of your head (but really, why would you want to?). And third, what better time to talk about one of our favorite, brain-healthy fats?

I recently had the great honor of interviewing Mary Newport, MD, who gave us lots of great information on the health benefits of coconut oil — particularly when it comes to keeping your brain sharp and healthy as you age. But you may still have some lingering doubts. After all, it seems to me I heard somewhere that coconut oil is unhealthy… didn’t I?

Likely you did. In fact, a google search of “is coconut oil healthy?” will yield dozens of expert opinions, pretty evenly divided into pro and con. To get at the root of this controversy, we need to get into the way-back machine. It’s a story told expertly, in all its glorious intrigue, by Nina Teicholz in her New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise.

oil war I

But to tell the story of coconut oil, we have to start with soybeans. In 1911, producers figured out a way to get oil out of soybeans, and it started selling like hotcakes. (Yum!) In fact, you may not know this, but soybean oil is actually the #1 bestselling oil in America today. Teicholz points out that Americans today consume 1000 times the amount of soybean oil that they did in 1909, making it the biggest change in the American diet in the last century.

One way the lowly soybean has maintained its top spot is aggressively fighting against other oils, like — you guessed it — coconut oil.

In the 1930s, coconut oil from the Philippines and palm oil from Malaysia began to make inroads into the American market. The American Soybean Association (ASA) acted quickly against these “foreign invaders” by persuading Congress to pass exorbitant taxes on them, quashing the competition and effectively kicking them out of the US. The trade war was won… for the time being.

Photo by Meriç Dağlı on Unsplash

oil war II

By the 1980s, however, palm oil had begun to creep back into the American food manufacturing market. As Teicholz explains, “it could do everything that soybean oil did, but 15 percent more cheaply.”

So the ASA went back on the offensive (and I do mean offensive). They “distributed speeches and leaflets, put ads and cartoons in newspapers, and launched letter-writing efforts.” One leaflet, titled “What You Don’t Know About Tropical Fats Can Kill You!” featured a picture of a coconut with a lit fuse like a bomb. Another showed “‘a surly looking tropical fat cat’ with a cigar and coconut drink in hand, sitting beside a black barrel labeled ‘palm oil.’”

“The point was: this devious Asian character with his tropical-oil excesses represented a threat to the American soybean farmer. The image was so offensive that when it arrived at the shores of Malaysia in 1987, protesters turned up in front of the US Embassy.”

Not only did they protest, the Malaysians fought back. Armed with scientific facts, Tan Sri Augustine Ong, director of the Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia, traveled to the US to fight the efforts of the ASA to get tropical oils labeled as a “saturated fat” — something that, in the low-fat 80s, would have been the kiss of death.

Ong made his argument using data, scientific studies, and nutritional information, but his ace in the hole, his “hydrogen bomb,” as he called it, was exactly that: hydrogenation. Ong ran full-page ads of his own, stating that 70% of the soybean oil in America is hydrogenated, a process that “seems to promote saturation and transfatty acids.”

This was years before trans fats became national news (a story that Teicholz herself broke in a 2004 issue of Gourmet magazine), but the ASA knew it didn’t sound good. The two sides met in Hawaii in 1989 and agreed: “The Malaysians would keep quiet about hydrogenation, while the ASA would stop its efforts to lobby officials in Washington against tropical oils, as well as any publicity efforts aimed at portraying palm oil as saturated fat.”

the aftermath

Despite this truce, the damage was done. American food manufacturers had already begun eliminating tropical oils from their foods. “No one trusted palm or coconut oil anymore.”

There’s an old saying that there are no winners in war, only losers. Who were the losers this time? Americans’ health, says Teicholz:

“And the result for the public of all these efforts… was that every packaged food product on supermarket aisles, every serving of french fries and chicken fingers in every major fast-food restaurant, every tub of movie popcorn were now made with partially-hydrogenated oil, which contained trans fats.”

The war over coconut- and palm oil goes on today, and doesn’t look to end anytime soon. But given how much we’ve gotten wrong about saturated fats, cholesterol, vegetable oils, and the rest of it, I’m putting my money on these all-natural foods.

This just one of the wild stories in The Big Fat Surprise, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I had the good fortune of running into Nina herself at the Low Carb USA conference back in January (and by “running into,” I mean, “chasing down and begging for an autograph”). Not only was she gracious enough to sign my copy of her book, she came to see my poster and agreed to a selfie:

It was a thrill to meet and speak with such a great writer and journalist. Don’t miss her substack, Unsettled Science. If I’m lucky, maybe I can get her to do a Zoom for us sometime in the next few months. Leave me a comment or shoot me a reply if you’d be interested in doing a book club with Nina.

In the meantime, have a coconut-nut on me!