When Kasma Loha-unchit recently saw a can of palm oil labeled as "organic shortening" on the shelf of her local natural foods store, she didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

The irony cut deeper when she read the second line. "Trans fat free."

The contents? One hundred percent palm oil.

Loha-unchit, a 30-year transplant from Thailand who teaches Thai cooking, might well have vented by picking up her cleaver to thwack open some coconuts and cook a traditional Thai meal with the fatty coconut milk. The coconut and palm oils in her kitchen were always organic, pure and trans fat free.

She felt vindicated. In 20 years, with the kind of lightning speed that defines a lifetime in America, coconut and palm oils have come full circle, from full embrace to vilification to comeback.

That's Ironic

If Loha-unchit discovered irony in America, Western scientists in Thailand in the 1950s were even more perplexed. Scientists from Cornell recorded a diet based almost exclusively on saturated palm oils (coconut is a palm) and rendered pork fat, often in what they considered to be in enormous percentages. Yet the incidence of heart disease among Thais is small. Scientists named the phenomenon the Thai Paradox.

It wasn't such a paradox to Loha-unchit, even though for years in the United States she'd run into a wall of disbelief whenever she mentioned that she cooked almost exclusively with tropical oils.

When she took the annual health tests offered by her corporate employer, her profile was a model of restraint in all the parameters -- weight, cholesterol and blood pressure. When the health workers asked her how she maintained that profile, and she replied that she ate coconut and palm oil, "They went, `no, no, no, don't eat that stuff. It's bad for you,'" Loha-unchit says.

Tropical oils are highly saturated fats, and as anyone who knew anything about health and nutrition in the '80s and '90s could recite, saturated fats meant cholesterol, cholesterol meant heart disease and heart disease meant death.

All the while, Loha-unchit continued unperturbed, stir-frying with palm oil, stewing the slow-cooked soups and curries in rich coconut milk, and making desserts from coconut cream. When she occasionally deep-fried foods, she used peanut oil, an oil high in monounsaturated fat, a concession to her students who would have balked if she used rendered pork fat, the preferred fat for deep frying in Thailand, or large quantities of the white, shortening-like palm oil.

"I knew that in Asia they've been eating coconuts for centuries, and they don't have any heart disease," she says.

Eventually, she and her husband, Michael Babcock, happened on research about tropical oils that explained much of her own continued good health.

One lipid scientist, Mary Enig of the University of Maryland, says, "The bottom line is that the saturated fat issue is phony. We've been misled about what's right and what's wrong." Enig emphasizes the need to consume saturated fats because they contain micronutrients and vitamins that are vital to metabolism, growth and immunity.

Even mainstream scientists are coming around to the benefits of tropical oils. A recent edition of the Wellness Letter from the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley argues that studies linking coconut oil to heart attacks are flawed. The report adds that the lauric acid in coconut oil likely protects against liver damage and stops inflammation.

More than half of the fats in coconut oil are made up of lauric acid, which is also found in breast milk. Lauric acid as well as another fatty acid, capric acid, have antiviral, anti-fungal and anti-microbial characteristics, says Enig.

Her abstract Coconut: In Support of Good Health in the 21st Century cites research from as early as the 1960s to back the claim that coconut fats "destroy lipid-coated viruses such as HIV, herpes, cytomegalovirus, influenza, various pathogenic bacteria ... and protozoa such as giardia lamblia."

Old Ways

Coconut plays a role in traditional Thai medicine and in Ayurvedic medicine tradition from India. Some nutraceutical proponents cite anecdote after anecdote of coconut fat-consuming patients who lose weight and fight chronic illnesses.

Babcock has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome since 1987. During a recent trip to Thailand, he drank a daily dose of fresh coconut juice because he realized that the lauric acid in coconut was similar to one of his prescribed medicines, a drug named Lauricidin. When he stayed with his coconut regime, he felt better and his immune system worked better -- no "turista" on that trip, he says.

Like most Asians, Loha-unchit eats rice as the foundation of her meals. She also makes plenty of Thai desserts, which, she likes to point out, are based on coconut cream and sweetened with small amounts of unrefined palm or coconut sugar -- never as intensely sweet as most Western sweets.

"The Thai diet is a beautiful diet," says Sally Fallon, co-author with Enig of Nourishing Traditions (New Trends Publishing, 1999). "It has fish, vegetables and fruits, and they cook with coconut oil and pork fat," she says. "They eat insects and larvae, all great sources of protein and fat."