Geoffrey Purcell wrote:
> I should warn you that coconut-oil and palm-kernel-oil are rather 
> dangerous fad foods. There's no real proof that they are effective
> in anyway, [...]

There is significant scientific evidence accumulating that coconut
oil has various beneficial effects, and some of that applies to
other medium chain saturated fatty acids based oils (such as 
palm oil) as well.

In any case, if you need a cooking oil, coconut oil is excellent
because it is stable at high temperatures, and also because it
keeps for at least 2 years at ambient temperatures without any
kind of processing or preservatives.

In fact, until about WWII coconut oil was the primary commercial
vegetable oil, precisely for that reason.  The development of
hydrogenation as a preservative changed that, and soon thereafter
margarine and other hydrogenated fats became a huge portion of
the western diet.  I belive that this one development was probably 
the single worst thing that happened to nutritional health of 
our civilization in the last century (before that it was the 
switch to increasingly refined grains from whole grains).

> but, even worse than that, they are the spur 
> behind the current psychotic(and useless) biofuels craze

This is true for palm oil and palm kernel oil (i.e. oil of the 
fruits and seeds of the oil palm or dendê) but not coconut oil.
Coconut oil is not economical for biofuel and I know of no 
place where coconut is grown specifically for biofuel.

:j