Victoria’s Secret supermodel Miranda Kerr told Australian Cosmopolitan that coconut oil keeps her skin clear, gives her hair shine, and helps her maintain a trim figure, ABC News Medical Unit reports.
Kerr told Australian Cosmopolitan that she downs four tablespoons a day of the “elixir” -- either on salads, in cooked foods, or in cups of green tea.
When ABC News Medical Unit asked Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at the Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, if coconut oil could really give anyone a supermodel body, Ayoob said, "I don't think so."
"I can't say I'd want people consuming lots of coconut oil. You should use it sparingly," Ayoob added, citing coconut oil’s high saturated fat content and calorie count, as well as a lack of vitamins and minerals, as reasons for not consuming huge amounts.
"You want to cut back on saturated fats in your diet," Ayoob said. "I don't know what benefit it would have for weight management because it has just as many calories as any other fat."
According to the Mayo Clinic, one tablespoon of coconut oil contains 117 calories. Kerr's daily dose of four tablespoons contains 468 calories alone, not to mention the daily calories she consumes from the rest of her diet. "She's getting 2½ times the amount of saturated fat I would recommend for a person consuming 2,000 calories per day," Ayoob told ABC News.
