General Info

Our coconut oil that is derived from fresh coconuts, not copra, and has not undergone the RBD (refined, bleached, deodorized) process that refined coconut oil derived from copra goes through. Almost all of the "unrefined" coconut oils on the market being marketed as "Virgin" are produced one of two ways:

1. Quick drying of fresh coconut meat which is then used to press out the oil. Using this method, the coconut meat is quick dried, and the oil is then pressed out via mechanical means.
2. Wet-milling. With this method the oil is extracted from fresh coconut meat without drying first. "Coconut milk" is expressed first by pressing. The oil is then further separated from the water. Methods which can be used to separate the oil from the water include boiling, fermentation, refrigeration, enzymes and mechanical centrifuge.

Applications

Cooking

Coconut oil is commonly used in cooking, especially when frying, and it has a high smoke point temperature which makes it good for this purpose. In communities where coconut oil is widely used in cooking, the refined oil is the one most commonly used.

Another advantage virgin coconut oil has is the lack of "Trans Fat" generation during the cooking process. In various states in the USA "Trans Fats" may well be banned in Resturants soon.

Coconut oil is often used in making a curry or in popcorn machines at movie theaters.

Manufacturing

Coconut oil is used in volume quantities for making margarine, soap and cosmetics.
Fractionated coconut oil is also used in the manufacture of essences, massage oils and cosmetics

Cosmetics and skin treatments

Coconut oil is excellent as a skin moisturiser. A study shows that extra virgin coconut oil is as effective and safe as mineral oil when used as a moisturiser (mineral oil is more toxic and in one article was explained as to cote the body in a "plastic" which then prevents the skin from breathing properly). When used as amoisturiser, with absence of adverse reactions. Although not suitable for use with condoms, coconut oil is an excellent, inexpensive lubricant for sexual intercourse. Before coconut oil is used as a sexual lubricant, however, it is recommended to do an allergy test.
Coconut oil can also help in healing Keratosis pilaris by moisturising the affected area. The coconut oil should be applied in the shower, and may cause the KP bumps to disappear.

In India and Sri Lanka, coconut oil is commonly used for styling hair, and cooling or soothing the head (stress relief). People of coastal districts of Karnataka and Kerala bathe in warm water after applying coconut oil all over the body and leaving it as is for an hour. It is suggested by elders that this ritual must be done at least once in a week, to keep body, skin, and hair healthy.

Bruce Fife C.N., N.D., a certified nutritionist and naturopathic doctor, is president of the Coconut Reaserch Cenre, Wrote in his book "THE COCONUT MIRACLE":

"For thousands of years, coconut oil has been used to make the skin soft and smooth and give hair a rich, shiny lustre. Polynesian women are famed for their beautiful hair and skin, even though exposed to the blistering hot sun and chafing of the ocean breeze every day. As a skin lotion and hair conditioner, no other oil can compare."

The small molecular structure akllows for easy absorption, giving both the body and hair a soft smooth texture.

It makes an ideal ointment for the relief of dry , rough and wrinkled skin. Many people use it as a lip balm because it is a safe and natural product. Unlike most othe body-care products, it can be used in its natural form without adulteration by harsh chemicals and other additives. For this reason, it has been used for many years as a body cream and lotion"

In Bruce Fife's book he also notes that coconut oil can reduce the symptoms associated with psoriasis, eczema and dermatitis, along with helping to relieve dryness and flaking skin, preventing damaging effects of UV radiation from the sun, such as wrinkles, sagging skin and age spots as well as controlling dandruff.

In diesel engines

Coconut oil has been tested for use as a feedstock for biodiesel to be used as a diesel engine fuel. In this manner it can be applied to power generation and transport using diesel engines. Coconut oil is blended to make biodiesel but can also be used straight, without blending. However, only blends with 10% or less of coconut oil can be safely used in unmodified engines. The oil needs to meet the Weihenstephan standard[26] for pure vegetable oil used as a fuel since otherwise moderate to severe damage from coking and clogging will occur in an unmodified engine . Stationary engines that are continuously loaded (>70%) may possibly be used without engine modifications but there is divergent opinion about this.
The physical constraints of using raw coconut oil in a diesel engine are formed by:

• higher viscosity of coconut oil (up to 10 times as high as diesel), leading to altered spray pattern of injected fuel, additional stress on injection pump
• minimum combustion chamber temperature of 500 °C to avoid polymerisation of the fuel, leading to clogged injectors, sticking piston rings and lubrication oil deterioration
• solidification point between 22-25 °C requires an additional fuel tank heater in temperate climates.

Raw coconut oil can be used as a fuel for generating electricity by remote communities that have an abundant supply of coconuts and milling capacity, provided diesel engines are adapted. Coconut oil is currently used as a fuel for transport and electricity generation in the Philippines [citation needed] and India [citation needed] while research is being carried out in the islands of the Pacific. In the 1990s Bougainville conflict, islanders cut off from supplies due to a blockade used it to fuel their vehicles.

The Truth about VCO

Coconut oil is the victim of an 80’s smear campaign against tropical oil producers, an attempt by domestic oil producers to eliminate the competition.

During this time, most coconut oil was hydrogenated—a chemical alteration now proven to be detrimental to health (The molecules in hydrogenated oil are unnaturally small, and can easily slip into places they shouldn’t go, like arteries). All hydrogenated oils should be avoided, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. But virgin, one hundred percent coconut oil has a slew of health benefits, according to Dr. Joseph Mecola. “Close to two-thirds of the saturated fat in coconut oil is made up of medium-chain fatty acids, which have antimicrobial properties, are easily digested by the body for quick energy, and are beneficial to the immune system,” says Mecola. Now, research says the oil is an anti-infection agent, and an effective treatment for conditions including HIV/AIDS. Lactose-free, it also works as a dairy substitute. What else? With natural moisturizing agents and antioxidants, it can be slathered onto hair and skin.

Mary G. Enig, Ph.D. is a biochemist and nutritionist at the forefront of research on healthy fats and as such has done much research and is aware of the "public miss-information" about coconut oil. Below is part of the abstract from a talk she did, which can be read in full by following this link:

http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/coconut_oil.html

Coconut oil has a unique role in the diet as an important physiologically functional food. The health and nutritional benefits that can be derived from consuming coconut oil have been recognized in many parts of the world for centuries. Although the advantage of regular consumption of coconut oil has been underappreciated by consumer and producer alike for the recent two or three decades, its unique benefits should be compelling for health minded consumers of today.

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VGP Marketing team.

Latest Article

THE VGP MARKETING APPROACH

AND THE EVIDENCE FOR COCONUT BASED PRODUCTS

Before reading this we at VGP Marketing would like you to consider the following:

Who are "they"?

Who stands to benefit from what "they" say or how are "they" funded?

A very important question you MUST always ask is this - when you hear someone say "they say it's bad for you" ask who is "they" and if you can find out who "they" are, ask, how and where do "they" get their funding and do "they" receive any major benefits from saying it!

I challenge you to talk too a few people on the subject of food, about what is good / bad for you and why and not get a few "they say's" thrown at you - the one thing you won't get is Dr Joe Bloggs has proven this is good for you because . . . .  Try it and see for yourself.

This simple way of stating things allows miss-information, false information and out right lies to be propagated and passed on as though it is truth.

THE FUTURE

More and more evidence is coming to light about the miss-information the public is given about various foodstuffs that we eat (as well as health in general, cosmetics and their ingredients and chemicals used around the house for cleaning both YOU (shampoo's etc) and the house). A simple point of reference is to look at what company is likely to benefit by pushing a particular theory forward.

Another important point to consider is technology and how this affects our understanding of food and how it works with the body.

The problem this creates is that some food product markets have been built up into multi-million turnover businesses that now find themselves on the wrong side of the new discoveries (and some not so new discoveries) and as such can't just say all our products are actually bad for you, don't buy them! So what has happened in many cases they just keep pushing the same miss or false information, but louder, (expensive PR and Marketing) to try to keep their market share.

As new technical information moves from a select few and out into public opinion, companies will start to change their products and gradually move them across to be more in line with current understanding.

The problem is that a lot of these companies are so entrenched in "keeping up appearances" that they loose sight of some fundamental questions:

1. Why do we need nutritionally good food?
2. What is the responsibility of the food manufacturer to the general public?

At VGP Marketing we believe that the food companies who can answer these questions correctly / honestly will be the suppliers of the future. Lets face it, it takes courage to stand up and say "new scientific data shows that we need to change our product on a right now basis" - the implications of doing this could be hard to confront in terms of costs etc in the short term.

It is clear that in this world today we are bombarded with information, saying eat this or that. Or give up this or that etc. But the average person on the street has no idea what is actually right or wrong, although, through the use of the internet people are becoming more informed and it will slowly but surely become more difficult to fool people.

The old saying "you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time" applies as always and any company who forgets this will one day be the effect of it - except there is one way to avoid the trap:

TRUTH

The one element that will always shine through is "truth" - if you always deal in truth you can always stand with your head held high.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS?

Any company that is looking towards its long term future should consider what they are doing to their paying customers - if their paying customers are healthy, they will be able to focus "outwardly" and therefore have the ability to earn more money and therefore buy more of the products being produced. But if your paying customers are becoming less and less healthy (a person tends only to look inwardly when they don't feel well) due in part to the products you are selling them, eventually they will not have the money to buy as many of your products and will buy less.

So looking after your customer's health will in the long run pay dividends.

COCONUT

And so we come to Coconut oil and coconut products. Coconut oil has a long proven history of health related benefits and there has been much written about the coconut and its ability to help many ailments, including its recent evidence in helping aids patients.

SATURATED FAT - friend or foe?

Saturated fat has been hailed by certain "they's" as the big enemy, but if you read the work of Dr Mary Enig (a biochemist and nutritionist at the forefront of research on healthy fats) and Bruce Fife (nutritionist and naturopathic doctor) who is also the president of the Coconut Research Centre, it soon becomes clear that miss-information has allowed the public to be lead down one of life's blind alleyways.

Both the above have the same thing to say about saturated fats - there are different types of saturated fat and the saturated fat in coconut oil is good for you.

The health benefits of coconut oil are now well documented and there is now a lot of information available about it's amazing benefits.

So here again we have had miss-information about saturated fats, becoming public "knowledge" or perhaps we should say public "following", because the public has not tended to find out for themselves - you just get the "they say" without any real understanding.

This also relates to the saying about "fooling the people" - after being told this and that and finding it doesn't work, the public is now slowly starting to look for themselves as can be evidenced by the growth in the organic food market - which has grown without all the major PR and Marketing funding!

So in truth if you want to understand about saturated fats we at VGP Marketing would highly recommend reading "EAT FAT, LOSE FAT" by Dr Mary Enig and Sally Fallon and "THE COCONUT OIL MIRACLE" by Bruce Fife.

THE ENEMY

So why isn't coconut in wide use? Well because of vegetable oil!

In the books above there is much information about the problems with vegetable oil including the issues with Trans Fats. The issue with Trans Fats is now becoming main stream news with the likes of Burger King being sued for its use of oils with trans fats in them. (click here) Many other fast food companies are now either moving or looking at alternatives.

Vegetable oil has many downsides from a health point of view and some of the attributes of these downsides have been long known - for instance in an article by Dr Ray Peat "Coconut oil and its Virtues" he talks about experiments that were done in the 1940's:

"In the 1940s, farmers attempted to use cheap coconut oil for fattening their animals, but they found that it made them lean, active, and hungry.  For a few years, an anti-thyroid drug was found to make the livestock get fat while eating less food, but then it was found to be a strong carcinogen, and it also probably produced hypothyroidism in the people who ate the meat.  By the late 1940s, it was found that the same anti-thyroid effect, causing animals to get fat without eating much food, could be achieved by using soy beans and corn as feed.

Later, an animal experiment fed diets that were low or high in total fat, and in different groups the fat was provided by pure coconut oil, or a pure unsaturated oil, or by various mixtures of the two oils.  At the end of their lives, the animals' obesity increased directly in proportion to the ratio of unsaturated oil to coconut oil in their diet, and was not related to the total amount of fat they had consumed.  That is, animals which ate just a little pure unsaturated oil were fat, and animals which ate a lot of coconut oil were lean."

In simple terms what they found was that by eating a diet with coconut oil, the animals became fit and lean and the animals that had vegetable oil in their diet became fat. And this was discovered in the 1940's!!

With the amount of vegetable oil in our diets today (its in far more products than most people realise) it's probably no wonder that obesity is the problem it is today.

Click  here to read the full article  http://www.naturodoc.com/library/nutrition/coconut_oil.htm

We can go on and on with article after article, link after link, but in the end what we at VGP Marketing want is for you to do some of your own research (there are several links on our links page to get you started).

BACK TO THE FUTURE

So back to the early part of the article, where we talked about the future. The way VGP Marketing sees things, there are primarily two factions at work:

•1.               Those companies interested in general public health and how their products can influence this.

•2.               Those companies who are "only" interested in the "bottom line".

This is not to say that a company in category 1. is not going to be concerned with the bottom line because we have to make money to survive as a company.

If we take category 2. to the reductio ad absurdum where the "bottom line" is the overall reason for the company, then they should take the shortest (most cost effective) route to making money and "print it"!

Many companies lose sight of the fact that money arrives by exchange - you give someone a product and they give you money and if the exchange is fair the customer's will keep coming back (so long as the product is a needed / required item).

On the other hand if all you want is your customers money and you don't really care what you give in exchange then eventually you will go out of business.

At VGP Marketing we are interested in a "fair exchange" with our customers and will do all we can to ensure our products that potentially effect public health are the best they can be. We will also move with times, so, as new discoveries come to light we will move with our product base accordingly.

As part of this philosophy our approach is not indoctrinate but educate - and educated person makes sane decisions an indoctrinated person makes blind decisions!

In simple terms VGP Marketing is an ethical company with an interest in you our customer, because without you, we can't exist!

So by looking after your needs we look after VGP Marketing, as opposed to looking after ourselves by using you the customer.

Please feel free to comment on any aspect of this article as we would welcome any feedback.

VGPM Team