War on Coconut Oil: California Companies Attacked to try and Prevent the Sale of Coconut Oil
Companies selling coconut oil in California are finding out the hard way that they cannot claim that coconut oil is "healthy" because the FDA does not allow such a claim, even if scientific studies back up this claim, along with hundreds of thousands of customer testimonials about the health benefits of coconut oil. Several companies are now fighting class action lawsuits for the sale of their brand of coconut oil in California, including Nutiva, Nature’s Way, BetterBody, Carrington Farms, All Market’s (Vita brand), Costco (Kirkland label), and others. The people who are bringing these lawsuits are stating that these companies are violating FDA regulations by indicating that coconut oil is healthy when the FDA says this claim cannot be made. The foundational premise upon which the cases have been built, rests on the belief that coconut oil is saturated fat, and therefore it is unhealthy. Their attorneys are claiming that their clients were misled and deceived by the information on coconut oil labels. The belief that saturated fats are not healthy is based on the now debunked lipid theory of heart disease, which states that consumption of saturated fats leads to elevated levels of cholesterol, which leads to an increase in heart disease. Ancel Keyes was the original researcher to put forward this theory, which was later adopted by Congress as part of USDA dietary advice, and his research has been completely discredited. In fact, the science actually points to the opposite, that people with high levels of cholesterol actually live longer than those with low cholesterol. However, If the FDA believes that saturated fat is unhealthy, then it will not allow a product that contains more than 1 gram of saturated fat per serving to be called healthy. Will the sale of coconut oil soon be illegal in the United States?