Hi, I'm Dr. Tod Cooperman, President and
Founder of ConsumerLab.com, and I'm here
to talk to you today about coconut oils --
both virgin coconut oils as well as
refined, as well as MCT oils which are
basically further refined coconut oils.
I'm going  tell you about the differences. We recently tested all of these products
and compared the amounts of medium chain triglycerides found in them, or MCTs,
because these MCTs are in coconut oil
but you can basically make products that
are really more focused on just the MCTs.
Now the MCTS are a type of triglyceride
or fat. Fats are basically a glycerol
molecule attached to three fatty acids.
These fatty acids vary in size. The ones
that are medium chain size are the MCTs
and they are caprylic, capric, and lauric
acids. Lauric acid is the largest
of the three, and some people feel that
it it acts a little bit more like a
long-chain fatty acid than a medium
chain. What people believe about the
medium chains is that they can be
converted a little faster into energy and
less likely to become fat,  and so
coconut oils and MCT oils are used in
dieting, and they've been tried in a number of other
conditions including Alzheimer's disease,
fat wasting diseases, etc. The
results are really mixed, I would say, in
terms of whether it really is effective
or not. However,
there's a great amount of interest
in these products. We wanted to know how
do they vary and differ and all this is
in our report online for our ConsumerLab
subscribers at ConsumerLab.com in our
coconut-MCT oil report. So i just want to
tell you kind of our general
findings here.  First, for the coconut oils,
and these are the virgin coconut oils.
First, we found that you know there's
virgin and extra virgin: We really didn't
see much of a difference in terms of the
chemical composition between the extra
virgin and the virgin ,so you are
probably just as well spending the same
amount on
virgen as an extra version product --
it's not necessary to spend more for extra
virgin. We did find a lot of similarity
among all these products, although we
found a huge variation in cost.  You can
spend as little as just seven cents to
get about 8 grams of MCTs from some
products or as much as $1.68 from
other products, so you definitely can do
much better if you shop on the basis
of cost and use our information to try
to help you make that determination. The
next type that we looked at were the
refined coconut oils.  As you can see here
it's a clear liquid.  It also has kind of
a nice mild coconut smell. Obviously it's
not buttery like the virgin
coconut oils which have more of a semi-
solid consistency.  These are liquids. They
can all be used in cooking they have a
smoke point that's fairly low, so in
frying it's probably not the best
material to use, but you can use it in
baking these can be applied to the hair
to the skin -- they can be protective of
the skin of the skin, but what's really
different here is with the refined
coconut oils you are removing a lot
of the lauric acid that is the
longest of the medium chain fatty acids
so that you end up with a product that's
about 85% of just the shorter medium
chain triglycerides -- caprylic and
capric acids -- so you're going from about
two-thirds of the of the oil being
medium chain triglycerides in a regular
virgin coconut oil, although most of that
is the lauric acid,  to about 85% with
just the two shorter chain fatty acids
caprylic and capric acids in the
refined coconut oils. And then if you
want to take it a step further and you
want to get rid of any kind of remaining
medium chain fatty acids as well as the
longer chain
fatty acids, which you've mostly gotten
rid of already with the refined,
is you go to the MCT oils and here
this is where you see most
variation because they will either be
mostly caprylic or a combination of
caprylic and capric acids.  Bulletproof
for example is is 100% caprylic acid. 
Others are a mixture of the two.  Again
the cost will vary and range across
these. So that's kind of a quick
overview of how these products differ --
the medium chain triglyceride MCT
products versus the amount of MCTs in
the refined and virgin coconut oils.  Be
aware these are all saturated fats: The
medium chain "MCTs" are a hundred
percent saturated fat. There is concern
that that may raise your LDL "bad"
cholesterol levels. The American Heart
Association advises against consuming
too much of the saturated fats even
including coconut oil. Others will argue
that there really isn't much evidence
showing a cardiovascular negative effect
from from these MCT or coconut oils,
which also somewhat appears to be
true. So it may raise your cholesterol, but
will it really hurt you overall? Not
clear at the at this moment. If you have
any other questions, feel free to post
them here where you see this video and
we encourage you to see the full report
at ConsumerLab.com where we've covered
this and many other types of healthy
foods and dietary supplements. Thank you
very much.
