The Botanical Archives No. 008: Coconut Oil, From Tree of Life to Kitchen Cupboard Villain and Back

Few ingredients in this Library have swung as dramatically between reputations as coconut oil: sacred and indispensable across an enormous stretch of the world for millennia, then vilified by Western nutrition science for decades, then rehabilitated into a wellness-culture superfood, and now the subject of renewed, more sober scientific caution. All of that happened to essentially the same jar of fat.

The coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, is one of the most successful travelling plants in human history, and unusually, it did not need people alone to spread it. Coconuts can float, remain viable in seawater for months, and wash ashore capable of germinating on a completely new coastline, which gave the species a genuine head start before human beings ever became involved. What people then did, deliberately, was accelerate and extend that spread far beyond what ocean currents alone could achieve.

The canoe plant that fed the Pacific

Botanists and anthropologists generally regard the coconut palm as one of the classic canoe plants, deliberately carried aboard the voyaging canoes of Austronesian peoples as they settled the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands over several thousand years, one of the most remarkable maritime migrations in human history. A plant capable of providing food, drink, fibre, building material and fuel from a single, easily transported nut was an obvious choice for people setting out to establish entirely new communities on remote islands with no guarantee of what else they would find growing there. Across enormous stretches of the Pacific, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia, the coconut palm subsequently earned the epithet tree of life, or its local equivalent, a title reflecting genuine, comprehensive dependence rather than poetic exaggeration. Coconut oil itself, pressed or extracted from the dried flesh, became correspondingly central to cooking, skin and hair care, and traditional medicine across this entire region, in a continuous line of use stretching back centuries before any of it was written down in a language that has survived.

Colonial trade and the copra economy

European colonial expansion into the Pacific and Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned coconut oil from a subsistence and local-trade good into a significant global commodity. Copra, the dried coconut flesh from which oil is extracted, became a major export crop across colonial Pacific territories, with German, British, French and other colonial administrations establishing plantations and trading networks specifically to extract and ship copra to soap and margarine manufacturers in Europe. That colonial plantation economy reshaped land ownership, labour and local economies across large parts of the Pacific in ways whose consequences considerably outlasted the colonial administrations themselves, and it is a reminder that coconut oil’s modern global availability has a considerably less romantic history than the tree of life imagery alone suggests.

The fall: saturated fat and the tropical oils scare

Coconut oil’s more recent Western history takes an entirely different turn. From the 1950s onwards, as nutritional science increasingly focused on dietary saturated fat as a driver of cardiovascular disease, coconut oil, alongside palm oil, found itself grouped under the broad, unflattering banner of tropical oils and treated with escalating suspicion. That suspicion reached a notable public peak in the 1980s, when American consumer advocacy campaigns specifically targeted the use of coconut oil in cinema popcorn and processed food, contributing to a wholesale shift by American food manufacturers away from tropical oils and towards partially hydrogenated vegetable oils instead, a substitution that later research would show carried its own, arguably worse, health consequences through trans fats. For several decades, coconut oil went from an unremarkable cooking fat to something closer to a dietary villain in mainstream Western nutritional advice.

The rehabilitation, and its limits

Coconut oil’s twenty-first century reputation underwent an almost complete reversal. Beginning in the 2000s and accelerating sharply through the 2010s, wellness culture and a wave of popular health writing recast coconut oil as a superfood, crediting it with benefits ranging from weight loss to improved cognitive function to general wellbeing, often citing its content of medium-chain triglycerides as a mechanism distinguishing it from other saturated fats. Sales and cultural visibility rose accordingly, and coconut oil became, for a period, one of the most talked-about ingredients in food and skincare alike. Mainstream cardiology and nutrition science, however, did not fully follow that reversal. A 2017 advisory from the American Heart Association specifically examined coconut oil and concluded that, because it raises LDL cholesterol in a manner similar to other saturated fats, its use as a dietary fat should not be encouraged, directly contradicting much of the health-halo marketing built up around it during the preceding decade. The honest position, considering the full arc of this history, is neither the mid-century vilification nor the more recent superfood enthusiasm, but something more measured in between: a genuinely useful, historically significant fat with real cosmetic and culinary strengths, examined in our complete guide to carrier oils and put to work in dishes such as our White Fish Coconut Curry, whose dietary saturated fat content nonetheless deserves the same ordinary moderation as any other.

One ingredient, three separate stories

What makes coconut oil’s history worth telling properly is how rarely all three chapters get told together. The tree of life story is usually told in isolation, a celebration of Pacific ingenuity and botanical good fortune. The saturated fat story is usually told by nutrition writers with no interest in Austronesian voyaging history. And the superfood rehabilitation is usually told by neither, as though coconut oil’s reputation had no history at all before it appeared on a wellness blog. Put together, the full arc, sacred staple, colonial commodity, dietary villain, rehabilitated superfood, contested fat, tells a considerably more honest and more interesting story than any single chapter does alone, and it is a useful reminder that an ingredient’s reputation can move a very long way in either direction without the chemistry of the fat itself changing at all.

From the archive to the kitchen

References and further reading

• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants of the World Online: Cocos nucifera L. POWO taxon record
• Sachet, M.H. & Fosberg, F.R. Historical background of coconut distribution and cultivation in the Pacific, discussed within the wider ethnobotanical literature on Austronesian canoe plants.
• Sacks, F.M. et al. (2017). Dietary fats and cardiovascular disease: a presidential advisory from the American Heart Association. Circulation, 136(3), e1-e23. doi:10.1161/CIR.0000000000000510