Coconut Oil...

In recent years a growing emphasis has been placed on the importance of Coconut Oil and its use in cooking, cleaning, and other health applications. Some of the main arguments I've heard for it can largely be summed up in this article for "10 Great Reason You Should Be Using Coconut Oil!"

I took the liberty to read through it and to their credit they gave at least some sort of benefit and why for each statement; but...

They didn't bother to provide any links to the research that they referenced.

Saturated Fat

Don't get me wrong, I think coconut oil tastes wonderful. The other day we received a plate of cookies that we were told were lovingly made with coconut oil instead of shortening. They tasted FANTASTIC. Which doesn't surprise me all that much; if you were to look at a chart of oils and how saturated they were, you'd find that coconut oil is one of the highest on the list for saturated fats. It also is exactly how I think coconut oil should be used in a "healthy sense" - a great substitute for shortening.

Common Oils and their properties

If you took the time to look at the chart above (which I hope you did) you probably noticed coconut oil there at the bottom being over 80% of Saturated Fat. I was tempted to place other charts on there that just blatantly said whether the fat was good or bad, but in case you are new as to which fats are good for you and which are not... Saturated Fats are bad (Trans Fats are even worse).
So when I first start hearing about how good coconut oil is supposed to be for you, I immediately begin to think of this.

Healthy Oils

Lets review a few quick tips for how to determine the likely health of an oil just by looking at it - it's really quite simple.
If the oil is liquid at room temperature it has less saturated fats. If the oil is solid at room temperature it has more saturated fats. Also the more clear the oil the less saturated fats it has.
Ex) Olive Oil is liquid at room temperature and is more clear. Coconut oil is solid at room temperature and completely opaque.
You can get an idea then that because of the nature of these oils, unsaturated fats will melt more easily, becoming more "pliable" when warm. When they are inside your body these fats move a lot easier and they even have room in their chemical makeup to pick up some of those bad cholesterols lying around (LDLs).

Cooking With Oils

One of the most common reasons I've heard for using coconut oil is that it cooks really well in high temperatures and thus avoids creating trans-fats in your cooking (this also happens to be reason number eight on the link I posted for 10 great reasons to use coconut oil). I wondered if the temperatures that we actually cook at would produce trans-fats or if this was just further marketing to promote the use of coconut oil. So I did a little digging and found a wealth of information on the internet concerning the topic. Lo and behold the articles which I will provide references for not only confirmed my suspicion but further upheld my argument against coconut oils. I encourage you to take the time to read over these two articles I've chosen as the most concise and helpful in learning about oils and health in general; there's even a few other nuggets of information you will learn about good health. For example, did you know that nutrition label facts can state 0 grams of trans fat if the food product contains less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving. And do you know who can set the serving sizes? I'll tell you, the food company sets the serving size. So just change the serving size to something that has less than .5 grams of trans fat and now you can report that it has 0. Article 2 explains further on how to tell if a food might still contain trans fats.
Article 1
Article 2
But to paraphrase; in a domestic kitchen you will not be cooking at temperatures and pressures high enough to create trans fats. If you are still worried, then they recommend to try an oil with a high smoke point (so as to avoid weird flavors) such as rapeseed oil, peanut oil, or sunflower oil.

Summary

I'll finish my rant now, but I hope that this has helped you become a wiser consumer of information. I will let you do the rest of the research on the article I mentioned earlier in this rant and its claims on health benefits for using coconut oil. But sufficeth to say, that I don't really believe many if any of them (except for the last one, coconut oil does make delicious desserts).

Tanning...

I recently engaged in a discussion with some co-workers of whom I happened to be eavesdropping in on at the time. They were discussing the benefits of a new company gym pass that allowed free tanning and were excitedly pursuing the topic. I just had to drop in and give my two cents on the matter; "Tanning, really? Why would anyone still go tanning?" The response I got was from one of my male coworkers while the rest went awkwardly silent. He informed me that he tanned because he was going on a 5 day hike and didn't want to get the burn while hiking. "Okay" I told him, "I can sort of see the logic behind that thinking, but..."

Let me pause right there, wasn't there this huge stink about how bad tanning was for your skin and how it has some pretty direct correlations with skin cancer and that you'd have to be an idiot to willingly subject yourself to harmful UV radiation without wearing protection back in the early 2000s? How is this still a discussion that we have to have, especially among educated, bright, young adults?

Lets review some of the basics:

The Healthy Part of Sun Exposure:
This is when you have a healthy amount of time in the sun. Your body actually uses the it to help produce Vitamin D, an important substance that helps in the absorption of calcium and phosphorus, it also aids in the communication channels of our cells throughout our bodies. You don't even actually need tons of exposure, 10 minutes outside is probably good enough for most people, but feel free to spend some additional time doing some moderate intensity physical activity (30 minutes would be perfect); such as gardening, a light jog, a brief walk through a park, etc...
With healthy acute exposure to the sun you may also have some skin pigmentation darkening to help naturally in defense of the suns UV rays.

The Harmful Part of Sun Exposure:
Sunburns - this is probably the most common and well known part of harmful sun exposure, it is often characterized by redness of the affected area, increase pain susceptibility and depending on the severity of the burn may involve painful blisters (2nd degree and may also need skin grafting of the entire dermis layer is destroyed) and blackness or whiteness and will be dry (3rd degree). This may also result in leathery looking skin and at this point has pretty much destroyed the skin.
But what you may not have known was that it can take only 15-30 minutes in midday sun to receive a sunburn without adequate protection.
For a good amount of protection (depending on your type of skin) you should probably use a broad-spectrum sunscreen of SPF 15 at least. If you are fair skinned or have blond hair, blue eyes, or red hair then you may want to consider a higher SPF. Feel free to learn more about sun blocks here.

Premature Aging of the skin - We all know what this looks like. You've seen the men and women who look like they could be easily in their 30's or 40's but because of their tanned leathery skin they appear to be closer to the 50's and 60's. This occurs because of a chronic exposure to UV radiation which in turn breaks down the collagen and elastin in the skin.

Suppression of the Immune System - There are actually a lot of fancy words I could use here to try to convince you of how the UV Radiation messes with the T-Lymphocytes (your white blood cells) and how that in turn causes problems with the identification structures that the body uses to identify cancer cells and other cancer inducing issues and how it then is less able to destroy those things and promote the growth of tumors, but I'll bypass that and simply say, that unhealthy UV exposure can further cause cancer (not just skin cancer). As always, feel free to learn more from this website

Eye Damage and Skin Cancer - I've combined the two since I think my point is beginning to be made: Unhealthy sun exposure (or UV radiation) can be very harmful and so intentionally tanning is stupid. Interestingly enough one of the prevalent skin cancer types has a name very similar to the pigment cells that cause tanning, Melanoma; whereas the pigment cells are called Melanocytes which form Melanin (the pigment granules that are essentially what cause you to look tan). In case you are wondering this is not a coincidence. So again, intentional tanning equals dumb.
As as you might imagine from the heading of this section, UV radiation can also cause a lot of eye damage which can result in a lot of seeing problems (which cost a lot of money to fix).

I'll go ahead and close my rant now, but finish with this:
Please... Please! Let's be wiser consumers of knowledge. We have these nifty little devices that fit in our pocket capable of accessing the worlds knowledge on a huge variety of topics. Most of them we can just talk to and it will pull relevant searches for us to learn more about.
Now I know this rant didn't include all the topics, some of the sources sited aren't the best or most reliable and so forth, but that's okay. I really just wanted to give you an idea of how easy it is to pull relevant data quickly.

My advice, also check both sides of the story. Try to find relevant sources (journals, articles, and websites from .gov and .edu sites are typically pretty reliable).

I hoped this helped. If you have a topic that you'd like to learn more about, a "fad' that you've heard so much about but would like to know more let me know. I'd love to learn more about it and give my 2 cents worth.

- Braden