Dave Asprey breaks down coconut oil's actual composition: only about 52% is medium-chain triglycerides, and most of that isn't as bioavailable as purified MCT oil. You'd need roughly 20 pounds of coconut oil to match one pound of refined MCT product. Large amounts of coconut oil's saturated fat can let gut toxins cross into the brain, especially if your microbiota are compromised.
And coconut oil is one of those things where you say, all right, it's good for you. It is, to a certain extent, every kind of fat, including coconut oil. It's a whole bunch of different types of fats mixed together, different lengths of chains of fats. And people have heard MCT oils because I'm the guy who put MCT oils on the map. It turns out that 52% of coconut oil is MCT oils. So then an unscrupulous market will say, yeah, I'm selling MCT oils. Bad news, about 40% of the fat, and that's 90% of the MCT oil. And coconut oil, it's legal to call it an MCT oil, but it doesn't have the special powers for turning on your brain and mitochondria. So now you say, wait, this is labeled MCT oil, and this is labeled MCT oil, but they do very different things. So, yeah, you can use some coconut oil as a fat source, as a fuel source, but you can't eat enough of it. In fact, it would take 20 pounds of coconut oil to equal one pound of the stuff that I make. So it's ever clear. Versus weak beer. Is that analogy right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's important to say, eat some coconut oil, but a huge amount of saturated fat, like from coconut oil, if your gut bacteria is broken, will bring toxins from your gut into your brain, into your body.
