Research that compares coconut oil feeding with other oils to answer a variety of biological questions is increasingly finding beneficial results from the coconut oil.

Obesity is a major health problem in the United States and the subject of much research. Several lines of research dealing with metabolic effects of high fat diets have been followed. One study used coconut oil to enrich a high fat diet and the results reported were that the "coconut-oil enriched diet is effective in...[producing]...a decrease in white fat stores." (Portillo et al 1998)

Cleary et al (1999) fed genetically obese animals high fat diets of either safflower oil or coconut oil. Safflower oil-fed animals had higher hepatic lipogenic enzyme activities than did coconut oil fed animals. When the number of fat cells were measured, the safflower oil-fed also had more fat cells than the coconut oil-fed.

Many of the feeding studies produce results at variance with the popular conception. High fat diets have been used to study the effects of different types of fatty acids on membrane phospholipid fatty acid profiles. When such a study was performed on mice, the phospholipid profiles were similar for diets high in linoleic acid from high-linoleate sunflower oil relative to diets high in saturated fatty acids from coconut oil. However, those animals fed the diets high in oleic acid (from the high-oleate sunflower oil) or high in elongated omega-3 fatty acids (from menhaden oil) were not only different from the other two diets, but they also resulted in enlarged spleens in the animals. (Huang and Frische 1992)

Oliart-Ros and colleagues (1998), Instituto Technologico de Veracruz, Mexico, reported on effects of different dietary fats on sucrose-induced cardiovascular syndrome in rats. The most significant reduction in parameters of the syndrome was obtained by the n-3 PUFA-rich diet. These researchers reported that the diet thought to be PUFA-deficient presented a tissue lipid pattern similar to the n-3 PUFA-rich diet (fish oil), which surprised and puzzeled them. When questioned, it turned out that the diet was not really PUFA-deficient, but rather just a normal coconut oil (nonhydrogenated), which conserved the elongated omega-3 and normalized the omega-6-to-omega-3 balance.