Cold pressed coconut oil is recommended. If you get a chance read a book named 'Coconut oil miracle'. It clearly explains why Coconut oil is better than other oils. You can try the first 2 chapters on
Google Books and decide on buying the book based on that. The next best is Palm Oil. The book explains the PR that was made in the US and even AHA is party to that. The Soya bean oil was introduced to avoid importing tropical oils like Coconut oil and Palm oil. The marketing made in the last 30 years made us believe that Saturated fats are bad for our health.
Coconut oil has medium chain fatty acids that gets absorbed easily in our system. Being a saturated oil, it doesn't attract free radicals in our body and become contaminated. Most of the mono unsaturated (1 missing hydrogen atom) or poly unsaturated fatty acids (more than 1 missing hydrogen atom) is bad. They attract free radicals in our body and we dont know what they become.
Foods prepared with saturated fats have longer shelf life as they are immune from attack from free radicals. So a process called hydrogenation takes place to prepare fats used in most cookies, breads, biscuits, etc. The fat is heated up and bombarded with a stream of hydrogen ions making it completely saturated. The Vanaspathi used in cooking follows this process. This is bad as the length of the fatty chain (number of carbon atoms) are quite high and the fat is not easy to be processed in our system. Since Coconut oil has a medium chain fatty acid that is also saturated (fewer than 10 carbon atoms in the chain), the assimilation is better.
Besides it brings several anti-microbial and anti-bacterial properties. It is a common practice to apply coconut oil in surface wounds, etc.
After using it for 1-year, you can see a marked change in cholestrol and tri-glyceride levels.
