The Many Health Benefits of Coconut Oil

Many years ago I remember my mother telling me the dangers of tropical oils. She wouldn't buy crackers made with palm oil or any other products with the deadly heart damaging oil. How far we have come. Much info and misinformation has been propagated by the oil refining companies that has hidden the actual health benefits of this highly saturated natural oil. In fact, coconut oil is so beneficial it is now slated as a safeguard against the deadly disease killers today, cancer and heart disease.

Below is an excerpt from the book, Nourishing Traditions.

Tropical oils are more saturated than any other vegetable oil. Palm oil is about 50%saturated, with 41 % oleic acid and about 9%linoleic acid. Coconut oil is 92% saturated with over two-thirds of the saturated fat as medium chain fatty acid. Of particular interest is lauric acid, found in large quantities in both coconut oil and mother's milk. This fatty acid has both antifungal and antimicrobial properties.
.... these oils are stable and can be kept at room temperature for many months without becoming rancid. Highly saturated tropical oils do not contribute to heart disease but have nourished healthy populations for milennia.

From "The Coconut Oil Miracle"

When taken as a supplement, used in cooking, or applied directly to the skin, coconut oil has been found to promote weight loss, help protect against many diseases, strengthen the immune system, improve digestion, and prevent premature aging of the skin.

Another quote,

It is easily digested by the body and unlike other fats (which tend to go to fat stores), the medium chain fatty acids in coconut oil are used by the body for metabolism. Coconut oil is uniquely rich in lauric acid, a fatty acid chain that is a prime ingredient in mother's milk, which helps to protect infants from sickness. The lauric acid becomes 2-monolauren in the stomach which has been shown by research to have antibacterial, antiviral, and antiparasitical properties

I have been using this wonderful lightly fragrant coconut oil for a few years now with great results. The oil is excellent for frying, having the most highest flash point of any oil on the market today. (meaning it will not become rancid and contain damaging free radicals either when over heated.) Baking with coconut oil also produces light and fluffy results that maintains the freshness longer than low fat baked goods.

BUT, there has been just one issue that I have struggled with over this past few years! The cost of coconut oil is high! At over $30.00 per half gallon it puts it out of the league for the budgeting healthy consumer. Searching for a solution, I came across Mountain Rose Herbals a company out of Oregon that has 1 gallon of organic, cold pressed, unrefined coconut oil for less than what I regularily pay for a half gallon. (1 gallon for $28.00 compared to a half gallon for $32.00!) Furthermore, if I like this product I can purchase a 5 gallon bucket at $121.00 and maybe share it around with some friends and share the further savings as well.

If you have never tried the light and delicious flavor and benefits of coconut oil, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

Read the Label!

Continuing on our theme of the totally unnecessary inclusion of one of North America's biggest diet fixes, soft drinks. Let’s take a look at some of the other major components in just one can of soda, again taken from Dr Mercola's site, the leading healthy website on the net!

Phosphoric Acid: Which can interfere with the body's ability to use calcium, leading to osteoporosis or softening of the teeth and bones. It also neutralizes the hydrochloric acid in your stomach, which can interfere with digestion, making it difficult to utilize nutrients.

Sugar: It is a proven fact that sugar increases insulin levels, which can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, weight gain, premature aging and many more negative side effects. Most sodas include over 100 percent of the RDA of sugar. Sugar is so bad for your health in so many ways, I even created an entire list outlining 100-Plus Ways in Which Sugar Can Damage Your Health

Aspartame: This chemical is used as a sugar substitute in diet soda. There are over 92 different health side effects associated with aspartame consumption including brain tumors, birth defects, diabetes, emotional disorders and epilispsy/seizures.

Caffeine: Caffeinated drinks cause jitters, insomnia, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, elevated blood cholesterol levels, vitamin and mineral depletion, breast lumps, birth defects, and perhaps some forms of cancer.

Tap Water: I recommend that everyone avoid drinking tap water because it can carry any number of chemicals including chlorine, trihalomethanes, lead, cadmium, and various organic pollutants. Tap water is the main ingredient in bottled soft drinks.
Clearly, the over-consumption of sodas and sweet drinks is one of the leading causes fueling the world-wide obesity epidemic.

One independent, peer-reviewed study published in the British medical journal The Lancet demonstrated a strong link between soda consumption and childhood obesity. They found that 12-year-olds who drank soft drinks regularly were more likely to be overweight than those who didn't. In fact, for each additional daily serving of sugar-sweetened soft drink consumed during the nearly two-year study, the risk of obesity jumped by 60 percent.

Here’s another sobering fact if you’re struggling with weight issues: Just one extra can of soda per day can add as much as 15 pounds to your weight over the course of a single year!

Other statistics on the health dangers of soft drinks include:

One soda per day increases your risk of diabetes by 85 percent
Soda drinkers have higher cancer risk. While the federal limit for benzene in drinking water is 5 parts per billion (ppb), researchers have found benzene levels as high as 79 ppb in some soft drinks, and of the 100 brands tested, most had at least some detectable level of benzene present

Soda has been shown to cause DNA damage – courtesy of sodium benzoate, a common preservative found in many soft drinks, which has the ability to switch off vital parts of your DNA. This could eventually lead to diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson's

If you are still drinking soda, stopping the habit is an easy way to improve your health. Pure water is a much better choice, or if you must drink a carbonated beverage, try sparkling mineral water with a squirt of lime or lemon juice.

There is absolutely NO REASON your kids should ever drink soda. None, nada, zip, zero. No excuses. The elimination of soft drinks is one of the most crucial factors to deal with many of the health problems you or your children suffer.

AMEN!

Coke. It's the real thing - real dangerous!

Here is a fascinating article that I got off from Dr Mercola's site yesterday, about the habit of drinking coke. You may want to sit down with a cold glass of.....water!

Do you want to be healthy? Drinking soda is bad for your health in so many ways; science can’t even state all the consequences. Here’s what happens in your body when you assault it with a Coke:

Within the first 10 minutes, 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. This is 100 percent of your recommended daily intake, and the only reason you don’t vomit as a result of the overwhelming sweetness is because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor.

Within 20 minutes, your blood sugar spikes, and your liver responds to the resulting insulin burst by turning massive amounts of sugar into fat.

Within 40 minutes, caffeine absorption is complete; your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, and your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream.

Around 45 minutes, your body increases dopamine production, which stimulates the pleasure centers of your brain – a physically identical response to that of heroin, by the way.

After 60 minutes, you’ll start to have a sugar crash.

Sources:
Nutrition Research Center October 24, 2007

Go READ your vegetables!

Have you ever heard the phrase, "Inspire, don't require?" So have I. In fact, I have have used it and I even believe in it. Inspiring your kids to great activities and great reading is imperative to their success in their home education if you want them to continue to love learning all their lives.

However, sometimes, just sometimes, they need a little kick start. Occasionally they get in a rut (as we all do) and waiting for inspiration seems like a long winded ordeal. At these times I tend to lean a little heavier on require than inspire in order to get things moving again. It is a balance of both with sparing use of "require" from time to time.

We all know that some foods have an acquired taste and so it is with reading. Shakespeare may not appeal at first taste. Neither can some historical novels or great biographies. However the importance of them can not be understated. The vibrant energy that we get from truly inspirational lives put in print is worth every effort to get them to taste and see.

Furthermore, learning to love harder material is a stepping stone that we do want our children to eventually embrace. I refer to a step up in reading challenge or a gentle reading requirement as READING your vegetables. It takes work to digest vegetables and they are an acquired taste for many but the health benefits are far reaching. Vibrant education, articulate vocabulary and a solid Christian worldview are a few of the many benefits of healthy vegetable reading.

Conversely, a diet of junk food reading - comic books and some serial novels can dumb down and allow the reading palate to become dull. True, a little may not hurt you in the long run but a steady diet can make your heart sick and the desire for some time meatier tastes unpalatable.

So it is a wise mom who keeps a watchful eye over the reading choices of her children, and requires them to read a full balanced diet of science, history, biography and great literature. For a list of great meat and potatoes reading watch for future posts on the best of the best solid fiber and nutritional reading.

Real Life Learning-I wouldn't have it any other way!

One of the many benefits of having your children at home with you every day, is that they get to experience with you the daily events that make life real. If they were in a classroom all day their experiences would be contrived and scheduled and then graded. Many come out of 12 years of this assembly line eduction with just that, prestamped sameness, cookie cutter predictability and standardized test results.

Real life happens at our house. Sometimes it is the anticipation and preparation of the arrival of a special grandparent. Sometimes it is pulling over to the side of the road to fix a flat tire or handle another car problem. And sometimes our busy days stop completely in order to deal with a very painful event.

We buried our sweet little dog in the back yard yesterday. She had many problems and she was getting old. At 15 she had daily "accidents" and her little heart was so weak the blood was not getting to her lungs so she coughed a lot, gasping for breath. She had several tumors and sometimes bled from the rear area. The decision had to be made but it was just so hard to make it.

Yesterday had to be the day and I announced it to my teenage boys, "Go dig a hole." They knew what I meant. The tears flowed (mostly me) and I couldn't stop for a couple of hours. It was a painful day, getting those few preparations done. We ran a few errands on the way hoping to suspend the decision, I think. Last on the list was the Vet's office. We pulled in. I gathered myself together and approached the desk.

"Can I help you?"
"Yes," I squeaked. "We are here to have our dog euthanized."

What a cold word.

I did not make it past much more than that, searching the form I was to fill out through the tears pouring on the paper and smudging the ink. My boys were beside me with their arms around my shoulder, comforting ME! We must have been a sight! The lady in the back finally came to gently take her away and we said our brief goodbye's. They were kind and compassionate and I appreciated that. We were instructed to wait around the side door and we stood in the cold in muted silence fighting tears and wondering when it would be over. They finally came out with a box and her favorite down blanket covering her. She always liked to be covered up. The tears flowed again and we drove home and buried her beside the shed.

We were together the whole day through the pain, tears and the sadness and I would not have had it any other way. My two son's gentleness and tenderness was not only a support for me but they handled their grief in a manly dignified manner, important for them as well. It had to be done; they knew that, and we went through it together. We will have a few days of quiet I know, because grief must have it's time.

All of these real life events make up who our children are and will be in their future. Let's not ever separate our children from real life, in whatever form it may take-for the benefit of all of us.

Beanie, (Beanie Baby) January 26th, 1994 - January 8th, 2008
We miss you, Beanie

Another Day, Another Dollar....SAVED!

With even more purchases of energy savings light bulbs and another day on the ladder and we expect to wrack up additional savings on our power bill thanks to a great sale on compact fluorescent light bulbs.

We have a big house, probably too big for just the four of us at home now and so the power it takes to run this baby is steep. When my husband came home with his arms loaded with .....lightbulbs I thought he'd blown a fuse! But as he mentally calculated the difference it could make in our power bill, sparks ignited more potential savings in my imagination. This is how we worked it out.

We took out 5000 watts of potential power usage (66 light bulbs!) and replaced them with approximately 1000 wattage of potential use. That gave us a 4000 watt "savings," an 80% difference on the light bill! He estimated approximately 4 hours per day useage on every bulb in the house (which might be rather high)times 8 cents per KW charged with our power company = 1.28 per day X 365 days equals a savings of $467.00 per year. Minus the $50.00 invested in the bulbs yields an approximate savings of over $400.00 per year providing the bulbs last as long as a year. (They are advertized to last 7 years) That's over 1.00 per day, hence another day and other dollar - saved.....and we all know that a dollar saved is a dollar earned.
Any which way you look at it, I'm having a blast. Just call me the Merry Misery Mom. I'm in my glee.

I'm so excited!

I love saving money! I get chills up my spine, shaky knees and yet feel empowered all at once. My husband came home from Costco today with a big box of ....light bulbs!
"Guess how much they were?"
I shuttered. I just happened to pay a whoppin' $7.00 for ONE of these very looking bulbs at Winco (my cheap store) and do so every time one of our 13 spotlights blow out.
"Well..guess", he insisted.
"Umm , $5.00 each?" I hoped.
"Nope, $4.00 for a package of 6!"
"No way," I exclaimed.
"Yup, they are not your normal bulbs, they are compact fluorescent bulbs using 75% less energy." Working out the wattage and voltage usage my electrician husband estimated a savings of $300-400 per year!"

He quickly installed them all. They do not come on instantly though and in fact when we first tried them we were a little surprised at the slowness to become fully bright. Once they warmed up, (5-15 sec? or so) they seemed as bright as what we have had before,...no brighter! Yeah, I can compromise....open my eyes a little wider for that kind of savings. As long as the expected life span is as good as it says on the box we'll be set.

I am going to be checking our power bill and maybe charting it compared to last year this time to see if it makes a difference. I hope to shed some light on other ways we have learned to save money as well over the next few weeks. I'll keep you "posted!"