| Coconut Based Products, the VGPM Approach |
|
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!
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:
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.
COCONUTAnd 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 |