Here’s a fact you know: Coconut Oil provides an arsenal of highly effective defensive constituents which allow it to be extremely useful at aiding the body in many biological functions.  

Here’s another: This healer is damn good.

In this article we want to focus on what makes coconut oil, coconut oil—plus tell you a little bit more about how utilizing coconut oil offers you quick, burnable energy—and how this fat could actually help you shed a couple pounds.

Let’s start with fatty acids.

Classification of Fatty Acids

This is where diet and chemistry meet—the chemical makeup of coconut oil is a big part of what makes it so special.

If you’re not into chem don’t worry, it’s super straight forward:

Coconut Oil has almost no double bonds, making it nearly 95% saturated fats (that’s almost as close to 100% that the natural earth wants to be).

Before we go further, we wanted to put a sidenote in here. There was a study a couple of years ago that suggested saturated fats clogged arteries—that study was unfounded and found causation where there was a correlation (general overconsumption creates inflammation which causes the body to raise cholesterol in the bloodstream). We wrote about that before in this article.

Now, to add a little bit more complication, each of the Fatty Acids mentioned above are broken down into subsets based on the number of Carbon Atoms in the molecule. These are thought of as “lengths.”

Length of Fatty Acid Chain

When three fatty acids join together they form a triglyceride. That means we can have Short Chain Triglycerides (SCT), Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCT), and Long Chain Triglycerides (LCT).

The research concludes that Medium Chain Triglycerides make up between 40 – 60% of Coconut oil, clearly a significant percentage.

What is special about MCTs?

Most of the foods we eat consist of long chain fatty acids and our bodies actually break them down into short chain fatty acids during fermentation.

Medium chain fatty acids are special because they break down easier and much more quickly than long chain fatty acids.

According to Dr. Bruce Fife of the Coconut Research Center, due to the fact that “MCT molecules are smaller, they require less energy and fewer enzymes to break them down for digestion… MCTs are broken down almost entirely by enzymes in the saliva and gastric juices so the pancreatic fat-digesting enzymes are not even essential.”

That means that the energy from pure coconut oil enters the liver already broken down and easily utilized!

How this Can Help you Shed Pounds

The way we break down food into energy is complicated, and we’re not going to explain that in this article.

What we will say is that the easily accessible energy from pure coconut oil can be used to boost liver function so that it can process food into energy and push toxins out better. The  more energy your body creates and uses, the more calories you burn.

The more calories you burn, the faster your metabolism can run—you see where this is going?

We are not saying that just consuming coconut oil will make you lose weight—you need a healthy diet, regular exercise, and healthy mindset for that, but if you’re not already utilizing this healthy fat for the deep energy boost, you should be.

Do you use Coconut Oil for energy? Tell us in the comments.