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12.03.2025

No, coconut oil does not clog your blood vessels

If you use coconut oil in your kitchen while cooking, you're risking your life, according to nutritionists and cardiologists. The saturated fatty acids in coconut oil - or rather, 'coconut fat' - clog your arteries, they proclaimed. According to a recent large meta-study, which only includes trials, this is not true.

Study
The author of the meta-study we are talking about is Mary Newport, an American neonatologist who has focused on the application of the keto diet for Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes. She advocates a diet in which MCT oil and coconut oil are important sources of fat - and therefore clashed with the negative image of coconut oil in established science.

Newport never went on the attack head-on. She did not say that the cardiologists were completely wrong. She did point out that coconut oil does consist mainly of saturated fatty acids - regular cardiologists still often point to these as the main culprits - but that the saturated fatty acids in coconut oil differ from the saturated fatty acids in, for example, palm oil.

Coconut oil consists of 42 percent lauric acid, a fatty acid that behaves differently in the body than many other saturated fatty acids. You can see the structural formula of lauric acid below.

Newport's meta-study, which incidentally appeared in Nutrients in January 2025, is intended as a more thorough defense. Newport collected 26 previously published intervention studies in which subjects took coconut oil and in which researchers measured the concentration of the "bad cholesterol" LDL, the "good cholesterol" HDL and the damned triglycerides in the subjects' blood.

Results
The intervention studies that Newport used lasted from 3 weeks to 2 years. The amount of coconut oil that the subjects received daily ranged from 6 to 117 grams.

The table below shows more information about the trials used. Click on it for a larger version.

If we limit ourselves to the effect of years of coconut oil use, coconut oil led to a minimal increase in LDL levels of 0.7 milligrams per deciliter. That amounted to 0.8 percent.

The HDL level increased by 2 milligrams per deciliter. That amounted to 4-6 percent.

The concentration of triglycerides in the blood decreased by 3-6 percent.

Click on the figure below for a larger version.

Conclusion
"This study concludes that the dietary recommendation to avoid consuming coconut oil due to its effects on lipid parameters is not justified," Newport summarizes her findings.

Newport funded her research from her own resources. The costs of publishing her research in Nutrients were covered by the International Coconut Community.

Source:
Nutrients. 2025 Jan 30;17(3):514.

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