MCT Oil

MCT oil weight loss claims debunked by Columbia University study

Mike Matthews reviews the best clinical trial on MCT oil for weight loss from Columbia University. 49 overweight participants consumed either MCT oil or olive oil for four months. The MCT group lost only a quarter pound more fat per month, a statistically significant but trivially small difference. A meta-review of 14 studies found 8 showed no weight change at all.

"the long story short is this MCT oil stuff has been wildly inflated by some of the reigning health and fitness propaganda champions and their minions and unwitting dupes. And as you will soon learn in this podcast, MCT oil is really just another overpriced, overhyped weight loss, health optimization supplement that simply does not work as advertised."

MCT oil may worsen cholesterol and triglyceride levels

Matthews reviews a study where 17 men replaced daily fat with 70g of MCT oil for 21 days, resulting in 11% higher total cholesterol, 12% higher LDL, 32% higher VLDL, and 22% higher triglycerides. A Vanderbilt study found overfeeding MCT oil tripled triglyceride levels in just three days.

"Compared to the sunflower oil, it increased total cholesterol by 11%. It increased LDL cholesterol by 12%. It increased VLDL cholesterol by 32%. That's bad. It increased the participants' triglycerides by 22% and it slightly increased resting glucose levels."

No evidence MCT oil improves exercise performance or brain function

An Oxford review of 17 studies on MCT oil and exercise found 10 showed no performance benefit and 5 showed reduced performance due to GI distress. Matthews also debunks brain-boosting claims, noting the brain never truly runs low on energy even during extended fasts, and no clinical trials support cognitive enhancement from MCT oil.

"everything that you read and you hear and you see about MCT oil affecting brain function is based on mechanistic meandering and specious speculation, not hard evidence. Those claims have never been scientifically tested with clinical trials, and there is little reason to think that they would pan out if tested properly."

C8 MCT oil converts to ketones that stop cravings and reduce inflammation

Dr. Jockers explains how C8 caprylic acid converts immediately into ketones that reach the brain, signaling satiety and downregulating inflammation. Ketones also stimulate BDNF for enhanced neuroplasticity and nerve growth, allowing sharper and quicker thinking.

"Any topic you want, let's say it's some sort of rare disease, Parkinson's disease, dementia, rheumatoid arthritis, you can just type it in the search box. You're going to find the best, most thorough research-based articles on the best natural health strategies for those particular health issues with the best infographics that you can really learn and digest this information and be able to apply it into your life and apply it into the lives of the people that you care about. So, check us out, drjockers.com. And of course, be sure to subscribe to the channel, leave us a five-star review. And without further ado, let's go into the show. In this video, I'm talking about something you can take one teaspoon a day that will burn belly fat and stop cravings and help balance your blood sugar. What am I talking about? I'm talking about MCT oil, but in particular, I'm talking about a C8 only MCT oil. So, what does that mean? C8 means an eight-carbon chain MCT oil. See, MCT oil means medium-chain triglycerides. And so they can range from six carbons up to 12 carbons. And coconut oil has an array of all of those, but coconut oil also has a whole lot of long-chain fats as well. Long-chain fats don't act the way that medium-chain fats act. In particular, C8, caprylic acid, is the most powerful fatty acid when it comes to helping burn body fat, when it comes to helping stop cravings, and also killing candida and yeast and fungal species in your body. It's super powerful. So, here's what you do. Basically, all you need to do is you take roughly about a teaspoon a day of this. You could take more if your body tolerates it, but you take it with meals and it will stop cravings. The reason why is that when you take caprylic acid, C8 MCT oil, it turns immediately into ketones in your body. So, C8 goes right into our system and it will turn right into ketones in our bloodstream. Those ketones get up into our brain and they tell us I'm satiated and they start to down-regulate inflammation in the body. So we get a reduction in inflammation. We get a signal that says, I feel good. I feel satiated. And the ketones are a great energy source for the neurons in our brain. And they actually signal something called brain-derived neurotropic factor, which enhances neuroplasticity in our brain. It enhances nerve growth as well as synaptic growth and enhances our overall mental performance. So, we actually think sharper and quicker when we get the ketones up into our brain."

Start small to avoid digestive issues and build up gradually

Practical dosing advice for C8 MCT oil: start with half a teaspoon with meals, increase to a teaspoon, and some people tolerate up to a tablespoon. The goal is to feel natural satiation with no hunger or sugar cravings, enabling comfortable intermittent fasting.

"For some people, when they first start using a C8 only MCT oil, they get disaster pants, right? So meaning that they end up with the runs. And so you want to make sure that that's not the case. So I recommend take a few days and just do a half a teaspoon with your meals"

Nursing home study shows MCT oil improves cognition in elderly

Jockers describes a study at a nursing home where adding MCT oil to meals for one month led to significantly higher cognitive test scores in elderly residents with cognitive decline. He notes they used regular MCT oil (not C8-only) and still saw improvements despite the residents eating highly processed food.

"So the better you are at utilizing ketones for fuel, the better you will be at burning fat for fuel. And so now you teach the body to become better at burning fat because caprylic acid stabilizes blood increases ketones, lowers insulin levels. And when insulin levels drop below a certain threshold, you can burn fat for fuel. So it keeps insulin under control, helps teach your body to become a better fat burner. So even if somebody is on a processed food diet, which I definitely don't recommend, just adding in something like C8 only MC2L will help reduce their cravings. It will help their mental capacity and it will help fat burning. In fact, they actually did a study at a senior home, right? So a nursing home. And all they did was they added MCT oil to these individuals' meals and they did a pre- and post test. It was basically like a questionnaire."

C8 MCT oil converts to ketones in just three metabolic steps

Dr. Jockers explains that caprylic acid (C8) is rapidly converted to ketones, particularly beta-hydroxybutyrate, which cross the blood-brain barrier to reduce inflammation, curb hunger, stabilize blood sugar, and improve insulin sensitivity. He contrasts the three metabolic steps for C8 versus 26 for glucose and 12 for long-chain fats.

"quicker to metabolize than the lauric acid, but still takes a little bit longer to metabolize than the 8-carbon caprylic acid. That metabolizes very quickly. And in the bloodstream, our liver, it goes right into the liver. It's converted into ketones, particularly beta-hydroxybutyrate, and that elevates blood ketones. And that's one of the great benefits of MCT oil is the elevation we get in blood ketones. Those blood ketones get across the blood-brain barrier and they turn off inflammation in the brain and they also turn off hunger and cravings. So they help reduce hunger and cravings and they help you feel energized, mentally clear and energized. They also help to stabilize your blood sugar. So when ketones become elevated in the bloodstream, it stabilizes your blood sugar and improves your insulin sensitivity. That's one of the great benefits of doing like a C8 only MC2L, which is what I use, because it turns quickly into ketones, gets right into the blood-brain barrier, and has this really powerful effect at reducing inflammation in the brain, improving neuronal mitochondrial energy production. So the mitochondria are able to quickly use that as an energy source. In fact, the cool thing about caprylic acid is it only takes three steps to take it from caprylic acid and to turn it into cellular energy. Whereas with something like glucose, right, anything that we're consuming, breaking down into glucose, there's 26 steps that take place before we produce cellular energy."

Ketones balance the glutamate-to-GABA ratio for calm focus

Jockers describes how elevated ketones from MCT oil improve neurotransmitter balance in the brain, enhancing acetylcholine and glutamate receptor sensitivity for better memory and cognition while balancing the excitatory glutamate with inhibitory GABA to prevent anxiety.

"It also supports memory and cognition. This is because it reduces brain inflammation and enhances the receptor activity of all of our different neurotransmitters. So acetylcholine is the main neurotransmitter associated with memory and glutamate as well for cognition, right? Glutamate is kind of like the gas pedal in the brain. When we have good acetylcholine and glutamine sensitivity with the receptors, now, or not glutamine, but glutamate, receptor sensitivity, now we get better cognition, better memory, right? But the other thing is we need to balance the gas pedal of the brain with the brakes. The brakes we call GABA. We got to have the right ratio of glutamate, the gas pedal, the excitatory neurotransmitter, and GABA, the brakes on the brain, the inhibitory neurotransmitter that slows down the brain. We need a really good balance. When people have brain inflammation, blood sugar imbalances, insulin sensitivity, high toxic load, all the different factors that cause brain inflammation, they get overexcited, the neurons do. So they get too much glutamate, not enough GABA. What we want is the right ratio here, balanced ratio, glutamate to GABA. When ketones become elevated and cross the blood-brain barrier, it balances that glutamate to GABA ratio, allowing you to think sharply and quickly, but not being overexcited and having anxiety, but being able to really perform well because we have enough GABA in our system and we have good GABA sensitivity with the neurons."

MCT oil improves mood, stress resilience, and energy

Dr. Jockers explains how C8 MCT oil enhances stress resilience by balancing brain neurochemistry, with research showing reductions in depression, anxiety, and irritability. He notes the mitochondria easily produce cellular energy from ketones with very little oxidative stress or metabolic waste.

"And so they're responding to it, keeping them calm, under control, but performing at a high level. So this is really the best of both worlds. So it supports memory and cognition. It also improves your mood, right, your overall behavior and your ability to adapt to stress. So if you're under stressful, you know, if you're in a stressful period, actually getting ketones in the brain, balancing that glutamate to GABA ratio, reducing overall brain inflammation helps you respond to that stress and be able to handle that stress without breaking and being able to be resilient to that stress. And overall, the quality of your life is really going to come down to your ability to adapt and recover from the stressors in your life. And so the better stress resilience you have, the better you're going to be able to adapt to all the different challenges that you're faced with. And so, getting C8 MCT oil, elevating those ketones, that's one of the best things you can do to help improve your mood. Research has shown it helps reduce depression, anxiety, irritability. We talked about hunger, cravings, right? All of those types of things. And overall, enhances stress resilience. So really powerful there. And then finally, it improves your energy levels, right? Because your mitochondria are easily able to produce cellular energy."

Dosing protocol to avoid disaster pants

Practical dosing guidance for MCT oil: start with half a teaspoon to test tolerance, work up to a teaspoon per meal, and cap at one tablespoon per meal (two to three times daily). Jockers recommends the oil form over capsules for better dosing and value, and notes it can be added to coffee or taken during fasting windows.

"And so I don't recommend just taking MCT oil and chugging it. It comes in an oil form. I do recommend getting it in the oil form as opposed to the capsule because you get a better clinical dose and you get better value. You can get more of the oil for less money when you get it in the actual oil form. But I recommend starting with roughly a half a teaspoon to a teaspoon of a dose. Why? Because if you're really sensitive, you have a real sensitive gut, taking too much too quickly again can cause diarrhea and so start with a half a teaspoon and see how your body tolerates that i typically recommend taking it with meals but you can definitely put it in your coffee for example or take it during your fasting window and that will actually help you fast more comfortably and fast longer will it break your fast technically to some degree because it's got calories, it will break your fast."

Coconut oil vs branded MCT oil - coconut oil wins for most uses

Vinny Tortorich responds to a listener asking if Onnit's MCT oil is better than coconut oil. He says the advantage goes to coconut oil because it is cheaper, causes less stomach distress, and all MCT oil brands derive their product from coconut oil anyway. The exception is cold-weather activities where MCT oil stays liquid.

"Is there any benefit to taking Onit or now or any other brand over regular coconut oil? I would say the advantage actually goes to coconut oil. And here's why. Although Onit is a good oil and now brand and all these other brands are good oils, if you take a refined coconut oil, which means an MCT oil that they're If you take a little too much, you're going to give yourself a good round of stomach distress."

Mct Oil Discussion

As we've had fungicides, as we've had buildings with leaks where we haven't recognized the danger from these, in fact, we've had more and more of this mold-related illness.

"With Alzheimer's, there are dozens of things that can be contributing. And so what we want to do is address all of those. Yes, if you have pathogens, many people have, for example, Borrelia from Lyme disease or a Lyme co-infection like Bartonella or Babesia or Ehrlichia, things like that, then those need to be addressed. And of course, you need to change the underlying biochemistry. So as you indicated, there are specific biomarkers. So we want to know your HSCRP. It's a marker of inflammation, of course. We want to know your homocysteine, the marker of methylation. If you're not methylating appropriately and your homocysteine is high, then you are at increased risk for neurodegeneration. And of course, it's been published that you have a more rapid decline in your cerebral gray matter volume and hippocampal volume if you have a high homocysteine. Is that because of vascular reasons? What's the homocysteine? The publication did not distinguish. It just simply followed people over years and looked at the rapidity of the decline in volume and could show that not only was it more... Literally, you could put the rapidity of it on a graph with homocysteine and it fit very nicely. But then if you improved the homocysteine and brought it back to normal, they were looking at less than 7 as being normal, not less than 13, which is often used in labs. Less than 7. 7 as being normal. Then, in fact, what happened was people actually stopped their decline and leveled off. So it's suggested that this is a causal relationship, that it is a mediator of cognitive, well, of change in cerebral volume as well as cognitive type. Independent of other biomarkers? Independent of other biomarkers, yes. Wow. So we want to know that. We want to know whether you have glycotoxicity. So we want to know what is your fasting insulin. And again, people will accept it way off the scale. We have an unfortunate situation where classically we have accepted laboratory values as within normal limits, W and L, very arbitrarily as being within two standard deviations of the mean. That actually makes no sense physiologically. It just says that there's a distribution there. It doesn't say that that's optimal for your health. So we'd like to know what your fasting insulin is, and optimally it would be less than five or less than five. Although, again, within normal it goes much higher than that. We'd like to know your hemoglobin A1c, which again is a marker of your, essentially over the last two months, your serum glucose. We'd like to know your fasting glucose. These three actually give you quite complementary pieces of information, all related to this type 1.5 that I mentioned, the glycotoxic type. And then the atrophic, as you can imagine, there are lots of things. We want to know your vitamin D. And again, we want to see that it's optimal, not suboptimal, but within normal limits. We want to know your pregnenolone, progesterone, estradiol, testosterone, free T3. Now, we'd like to know your brain-derived neurotrophic factor and your NGF. There's no simple way on a clinical lab test today to get those. So you have to infer them from other things. What is your hippocampal volume? What have you been doing? If you change these various things we've been talking about, you're likely to have a decrease. Have you been exercising? If you're not exercising, your BDNF is likely to be lower. So we want to look at all of the trophic support for your brain because these are critical things. If you're going to make and keep a large network of synapses, you need to have that support. And again, that balance changes for many of us as we age, especially if we are ApoE4 positive. ApoE4 gives you an advantage in that you have a hair trigger, essentially, for inflammation. You are responding. So if you live in a squalid environment like the Chimane Indians that Professor Tuck Finch studied, for example, or the Ghana tribe that Tuck also has studied, you are in better shape if you're ApoE4 positive. But if you're not living in a pro-inflammatory, in an environment that's parasitic, then in fact, you have this chronic inflammation that, again, good for when you're fighting things, good for if you step on a nail, good for situations that should be pro-inflammatory, but in the long run, counterproductive. So, you know, as you know, this is, you know, this is so-called antagonistic pleiotropy. This is something that can help you when you're young, but actually can put you at risk for diseases that will shorten your lifespan. And typically, cerebrovascular disease, of course, Alzheimer's disease. And as you know, APOE4 is actually underrepresented in centenarians. So it has been a short-gevity gene, as it were. Again, that is changing and can change by understanding what's actually being driven by this. So we want to know all those markers and those for the type two. And then, of course, we want to know the markers for type three. So we want to know if there are specific toxins and especially mycotoxins. So the toxins can be metallotoxins like mercury, relatively common one. They can be organic toxins like DDE, things like that. They can be biotoxins like trichothesines, ocratoxin A, aflatoxin, gliotoxin. These are toxins produced by various mold species like stachybotrys and aspergillus and penicillium, which are literally fighting us. I mean, they're literally saying, okay, I'm fighting back. For example, one of the responses has been when you have mold growing on treated wood, they're recognizing something's changed. Mold that had been treated with fungicide. So these are things where just as we're seeing increasingly bacteria that are antibiotic resistant, as Professor Shoemaker has pointed out, Dr. Richie Shoemaker, who's done so much work over the years on mold and mycotoxins and described what he calls SIRS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome. As we've had fungicides, as we've had buildings with leaks where we haven't recognized the danger from these, in fact, we've had more and more of this mold-related illness. So we want to know all those things for the type threes. And then, of course, we also want to know if you have a history of head trauma. We want to know if you have vascular compromise. All of those things are critical. Now, you mentioned the diet. So yes, we want to start with the basics. But again, ultimately, it's a program that is customized to you based on what's actually causing your cognitive decline or your risk for cognitive decline. And so the nutritional part we call Ketoflex 12 slash 3. And it's for a very simple reason. So keto, so we want people to be in mild ketosis because that actually turns out to work better for cognition. And many people do better with their cognitive decline, just as Mary Newport showed, of course, with using coconut oil. And that may or may not be the best way to do it for some people. Other people like caprylic acid, MCT oil. Other people are very good at generating endogenous ketones, which if you can do it, is the best way to do it. And so we want to drive you into mild ketosis, which means a very low carbohydrate, high fat, good fats, diet things like avocados and nuts and seeds and things like that. And there is a caveat for people who are ApoE4 and a caveat for people who have very low BMI. So we can talk about that. The next piece is flexitarian. So you can be a meat eater or not. In general, we see meat as a condiment. But again, as we evolved, we tended to eat relatively small amounts of meat, but that's fine. If you do, if it's going to be chicken, it should be pastured chicken. If it's going to be beef, it should be grass-fed beef. Going to have fish, great. Make sure it's wild-caught, not farmed fish. You don't want to have the fish with high mercury. Those are the large-mouthed, long-lived fish, tuna, shark, swordfish, things like that. You want to stay away from those because they can contribute to your cognitive decline. In fact, one of the people who called me a couple of years ago was a very successful businessman who had early Alzheimer's, had already had PET scan proven, and they told him, come back in a year because you're not doing that badly yet. You're still in the MCI phase, but you could already see the signature of Alzheimer's on his PET scan. And when I listened to his story, I said, you've got type 3, and you need to find out if you've got exposure to any toxins. And he said, no, no, everything's great. Well, it turned out that he was eating large amounts of tuna sushi. And he happened to be genetically a poor excreter of mercury, also happened to have some dental amalgams. So he had extremely high organic mercury from the seafood, extremely high inorganic mercury from the amalgams, and then as well, so he had the perfect storm. And his mercury is actually seven times the 95th percentile for our country, just massive, massive mercury exposure. And he's done well with removing that. So we want to know those specific ones. And again, for fish, you want to think about the smash fish. And my wife, who's a family practitioner, reminds me about this, salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. And she's a real expert on the nutritional side and on the integrative medicine side. She told me 25 years ago, whatever you guys come up with in the lab, in your test tube, I spent my whole career looking at what is driving the molecular signaling that leads to neurodegeneration. She said, whatever you come up with, it's going to have something to do with what you're eating and your exercise. And I said, no, no, no, it's going to be one domain of one molecule, and we're going to get a drug for that thing, and it's going to be over."