"9. Avoid Coconut Milk or Coconut Oil: Coconut is everywhere these days, touted as a "healthy fat" mostly because of its creamy mouth-feel. It's in non-dairy milks, ice creams, & yogurts. Don't use it. It's a highly saturated fat. In just 1/4 cup of coconut milk(about 1 serving) you'll find 12 grams of fat — 10 grams of which are saturated. Even if it was found to be a healthy unharmful fat — it's still a fat, that's loaded with calories of limited nutritional value."

Coconut Milk

This trendy option has exploded in the marketplace. Marketers tout its health benefits, but limited research has been done on it. Coconut milk has three times the saturated fat as cow’s milk and ranges between 90-500 calories per serving depending on whether or not it’s watered down. Coconut milk is not included in Ornish Spectrum Group 1 or on Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

Coconut Oil and the Ornish Lifestyle Medicine

The research conducted over the last 35 years for the Dr. Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease has proven through validated studies that a very low-fat, whole food plant-based approach can reverse heart disease and other chronic disease. The recommendations continue to support very limited saturated fat from only plant based sources. Until further validated research on coconut or coconut oil proves the benefits, it is not recommended as part of Ornish Lifestyle Medicine.

Q: Some of my favorite plant-based foods are avocado and coconut. Are they good for my heart?

A: Not really. Avocado and coconut are delicious, but the bottom line is that both are very concentrated sources of fat. Our research validates that a diet with 10% or fewer calories from fat is ideal, which is difficult to reach with the inclusion of these two foods. Coconut oil, for instance, is made of 90% saturated fat; 13 grams per tablespoon—which makes it even more concentrated in fat than butter. A cup of avocado has 21 grams of fat. More recently, the guidelines around nuts and seeds have changed in Ornish Lifestyle Medicine. New research is showing a relationship between the consumption of limited nuts and seeds and cardiovascular health. Nuts and seeds are rich in plant-protein (10%-25%) and fiber as well as minerals like calcium, magnesium and potassium, plus many other vitamins and bioactive compounds.

Dr Barnard: "The coconut as you said, it's a natural food but on the other hand, it's way high up in a tree. It's something that people aren't going to get an enormous number of. Certain parts of it are less healthy than others. Here's what I mean: you cut a hole in the coconut and the water that's inside is not so bad. However, to make coconut milk: you don't milk the coconut. The way that coconut milk is made is that you actually take the meaty part of the coconut and it's all smooshed together. And then, you basically are extracting a fatty liquid from it. So the coconut milk and then the coconut creams that are made from it are pretty high in fat especially saturated fat."

Dr Barnard: I can't say you've set a very high bar here. Really! But no, researchers have studied this question where you bring in individuals and you actually feed them coconut fat or products made from it, or you can feed them coconut itself and what you will see is that their cholesterol levels do go up! There's no question about it. They go up substantially. So the question then is: why? You send the coconut to a laboratory, they will tell you right back in about six hours that the meaty part of the coconut is really really high in saturated fat! That's very unusual thing in the the plant community. You just don't see plants like that. If you send virtually anything — any vegetable, any other fruit, any bean, any whole grain to a laboratory, they find very little saturated fat. Coconut is a really big exception.

Dr Barnard: That's right. They're both high in fat but the coconut is really high in saturated fat. That's the cholesterol raising fat. With avocado or an olive they're high in monounsaturated fats. So calorie-wise, they're all a problem. Calorie-wise, every fat gram whether it's saturated or monounsaturated or polyunsaturated, they've all got nine calories per gram; they're all fat. But the coconut is saturated fat — that raises your cholesterol. The avocado is monounsaturated fat — that's not going to raise your cholesterol so much. Now if you want to get into the fine points (if you're studying for a test), actually about 14% of olive oil is saturated fat; most of the rest is mono. For a coconut — oh my goodness! — it's 80 or 90% saturated fat.

Dr Barnard: You said it! It is all marketing. 10 years ago, it was pomagranate and pomegranate juice. Look at what the dairy industry does! They'll call milk "real milk". Now it can cause real indigestion and all kinds of real problems but it's 100% marketing to label it as healthy! The coconut industry is doing exactly the same.

Dr Barnard: Great question! With cheese, it's dairy fat of course! With dairy fat, it is highly saturated but not as high saturated as the coconut fat. Coconut is almost entirely saturated fat. With dairy, maybe it's 70% or something like that in cheese. So they are both a big problem!

Dr Barnard: Yes, and it's frustrating the other side too. If you go to the health food store (the regular grocery store), and you wanted to pick up some soy milk, people have gotten afraid that soy milk might cause cancer, which it doesn't! It does the opposite. The mythology has worked against it. They've replaced it with coconut milk. You'll find the coconut milk which people are trying to give a pass to. Look at the carton! It's loaded with saturated fat. It's going to raise your cholesterol.

Dr Barnard: Absolutely! Take that coconut fat. You can put it in your hair. You can make your hair shine really nicely! You can shine your shoes with it! You can polish your car with it if you want to! But I wouldn't put it down your esophagus unless you want to have a high cholesterol. Chuck you said it: it's a natural food but there's a lot of things in nature that you don't want to eat: poison ivy for one; tobacco for another. It's a totally natural thing but if you wide up that tobacco leaf, stick in your mouth, you're gonna get mouth cancer. So not everything that nature devised was something that you're supposed to eat.

Dr Barnard: I would call it benign rather than beneficial. There isn't anything in there that you really need. But the water itself doesn't have the saturated fat in it. If you drill a hole in the coconut and have the water come out, it's water with some some nutrients in it. Has quite a lot of potassium in it but that's not a reason to buy it because there's potassium in just about everything else in the produce aisle as well. But the good news about the coconut water: it doesn't have the saturated fats.

Dr Barnard: Not really. One is not particularly better than the other. The Gatorade came from a factory — that's true. The coconut came from a tree but the tree is actually a biological factory that made something that's remarkably similar to Gatorade. It's mostly water, has a little bit of sugar in it, a few nutrients.

Dr Barnard: Probably not! That is something that might be called aspirational. I don't think it's gonna happen. By the way, let me come back to your Gatorade question. The big thing with Gatorade that I didn't mention is Gatorade is also filled with sugar. And that's for a reason! What's Gatorade for? The theory for it was that it's going to help a person who has done a lot of athletic endeavor to rebuild their glycogen so that they can continue to compete or compete later that day. That's the idea that coconut water doesn't have that.

Dr Barnard: Yes. If you apply it externally, it's fine. You could do the same with Vaseline if you wanted but it sounds sexier to use coconut.

Dr Barnard: No, no. And you don't eat it. I mean this is if you want to apply it externally or any product that contains it externally, fair enough.

Dr Barnard: If somebody's getting a particularly high fiber food — with fiber that's presenting a new challenge for your gut bacteria — the coconut water not likely to do that; the coconut pulp can do it because it does have a fair amount of fiber mixed in with the fat.

Dr Barnard: That's an interesting question. The potassium actually is right down that line. Coconut water is famous for having potassium. Potassium is part of what your your heart uses for its normal conduction. Potassium is an electrolyte that is involved in nerve conduction of all kinds as well, as in, your heartbeat. So in that sense, it's a good thing. However there is potassium in virtually anything botanical. So if you pick up virtually any selection of vegetables and fruits, you'll find lots of potassium in that. So it's not a reason particularly to go out of your way to buy a coconut.