Best MCT Oil

Not everyone has heard of MCT oil, so let me give you a very brief description of what it is and what it does. MCT stands for Medium Chain Triglyceride and even though it comes from natural sources, there are no natural sources of pure MCT oil. Instead, we take coconut or palm oil and separate the medium-chain triglycerides from the long and short-chain. Short-chain triglycerides typically taste bad and long-chain are not very good for us (although they taste good).

MCT oil is unique because of the way our body uses it. With long chains, as you find in other saturated fats like butter, lard, and all those great-tasting fatty foods, our body tends to store them as fat. MCTs, on the other hand, are converted into ketones which are readily used by the body as energy, and very little is stored as fat. That makes MCT oil a great energy source without the nasty side effects of clogging your arteries.

But wait a minute, you said ketones, and aren’t ketones bad? If you are diabetic or know someone that is, you probably know ketones as something bad that your body creates when you don’t have enough insulin to turn glucose into energy. In that situation, they are bad, but only because your body is being forced to create them. When you consume them, instead of your body creating them, ketones are a great source of energy that does not require insulin in order to use them and don’t get stored as fat.

That said, MCT is not a miracle. It is still an oil and represents a lot of calories. The best use of these oils is to replace some of the unhealthy fats in our diet. Use it in salad dressings or replacing other oils in baking. Or here is a tip. Make your peanut butter event healthier. Do you buy that natural peanut butter that has all the peanut oil sitting on top of it? Instead of mixing it back into the peanut butter, pour it off and replace it with MCT oil.

Medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oils should not be used for frying as it burns at a very low temperature. Many people use it in coffee, instead of cream. Placing MCT oil and hot coffee in a blender creates a creamy appearance with the healthy energy it provides.

Consider using a good, organic, pure C8, sourced from coconuts MCT oil in your diet. When possible, replace other less healthy oils. You will be surprised at how good they will make you feel.

We have 4 products that make our list of the best MCT oil. All are organic, non-GMO, sourced from coconuts instead of palm oil, and are pure C8 (the best type of MCT oil). For our list of the very best, click HERE.

For more information on what MCT oil is, checkout Healthline® or WebMD®.

If you read our initial story, “The Best MCT Oil“, you saw that 1 of our 5 criteria for selecting the best oils was that it must be sourced 100% from coconuts. Because of the environmental destruction taking place when rain forest is cleared in order to raise palm, we simply could not endorse products made from palm oil. In that story, we also noted that the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) had created standards for the sustainable farming of palm, but we were not ready to accept that those standards were having any significant impact on the industry. Now we feel it is time to revisit this topic.

RSPO was established in 2004. When their 2013 criteria for the production of sustainable palm oil were reviewed by the World Wildlife Fund, the endorsement was not exactly glowing. In 2018, the RSPO released an updated version of the criteria of which the WWF said, “With the 2018 revision of the RSPO’s Principles & Criteria, the RSPO Standard now represents an essential tool that can help companies achieve their commitments to palm oil that is free of deforestation, expansion on peat, exploitation and the use of fire.” For more of the WWF’s position on sustainable palm oil production, go HERE.

You can download the 2018 RSPO certification criteria HERE.

Then Came Malaysia…

After looking at many comments and reviews of the 2018 RSPO standards, and writing the first part of this article, we were ready to consider MCT oil products created with RSPO certified palm oil for inclusion in our list of Almost the Best MCT Oil. Then I visited Malaysia and spoke with some people involved in the reforestation efforts there. They know what it is like on the ground. They are intimately familiar with RSPO. After speaking with them we remain opposed to any MCT oil created from any palm oil, even those created from palm oil meeting RSPO standards.

Call to Action

We call for immediate additional RSPO criteria that require palm plantations, at a level commensurate with their current acreage under palm production, to carry out the following:

• Actively/financially protect the remaining forests of Malaysia.
• Commit to no future deforestation or peat destruction, or the purchasing of land that was forest or peat prior to 2020.
• Purchase carbon offsets for 50% of all former peat and forest acreage that has been brought under palm production in the past 20 years.
• Financially support wildlife rehabilitation and repopulation.

Without such provisions no set of standards is acceptable.