Is Coconut Oil a Healthy Choice?

Updated July 2026

This is one of the diet questions I get asked fairly frequently in my clinic. For years the honest answer was "it's complicated." The research has since caught up, and the answer is now clearer: coconut oil is not the heart-healthy fat it was marketed to be.

What kind of fat is coconut oil?

Coconut oil is a saturated fat, which is unusual for a plant oil. You can tell because it stays solid at room temperature, the same way butter does. Most plant fats, like olive oil and the oils in nuts, seeds, and avocados, are unsaturated and stay liquid. Those unsaturated fats are the ones shown to lower LDL, the "bad" cholesterol that drives heart disease. If you want the fuller picture on how the different fats compare, I laid it out in which fats are good and bad for your heart.

Coconut oil sits in the other camp. It is about 82% saturated fat, a higher proportion than butter at roughly 63% or beef fat at about 40%. That alone should give anyone managing their cholesterol pause.

Does coconut oil raise cholesterol?

Yes. When people replace healthier oils with coconut oil, their LDL cholesterol goes up. A 2020 analysis that pooled 16 clinical trials found coconut oil raised LDL by about 10 mg/dL compared with non-tropical vegetable oils like olive, canola, and sunflower. That is a meaningful bump, and LDL is the number most closely tied to heart attacks and strokes.

Coconut oil does one thing differently from animal fats. It also raises HDL, the "good" cholesterol, by about 4 mg/dL. That HDL effect is real, and it is the reason coconut oil earned its health halo. But a higher HDL from coconut oil has never been shown to cancel out the harm of the higher LDL.

Why isn't coconut oil as bad as butter, then?

The difference comes down to the kind of saturated fat. Saturated fats are not all identical, and they vary by how many carbon atoms sit in the chain. About half of the saturated fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, a 12-carbon fat that butter and beef fat contain almost none of. Lauric acid raises LDL less sharply than the longer-chain saturated fats in animal products. So coconut oil is somewhat gentler on LDL than butter, but gentler than butter is a low bar, and it still moves LDL in the wrong direction.

What does the American Heart Association say?

The American Heart Association recommends against coconut oil. In its dietary fats advisory, the AHA concluded that because coconut oil raises LDL, and because LDL is a direct cause of cardiovascular disease, coconut oil is not expected to offer any heart benefit and should not be treated as a healthy choice. One survey the advisory cited found that 72% of the public rated coconut oil as healthy, compared with just 37% of nutrition experts. That gap is a marketing story, not a science one.

So should you cook with coconut oil?

If you like the flavor, using a little now and then will not undo an otherwise healthy diet. But it should not be your default cooking fat, and it is not something to add for your health. For everyday cooking, reach for olive oil, and when you need higher heat, use avocado or grapeseed oil. And if you have been avoiding seed oils out of fear they are worse than coconut oil, the science actually runs the other way: in reasonable amounts they are a better choice for your heart than this tropical fat.

The larger point is one I come back to constantly. Any extracted oil, even olive oil, gives you around 120 calories of pure fat per tablespoon while leaving behind the fiber, protein, and other nutrients of the whole plant. The fat still packaged inside nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados is always the better choice. That is the principle Step One Foods is built on: real whole-food sources of the unsaturated fats and omega-3s your heart actually needs.

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