Virgin coconut oil: emerging functional food oil

Virgin coconut oil (VCO) is growing in popularity as functional food oil and the public awareness of it is increasing. It is expected that VCO will experience a dramatic growth in the market. The introduction of VCO has open up new research that basically reveals new things besides what has already been known on commercial coconut oil. This paper mainly discusses on some of the findings associated with VCO up to date. Physicochemical properties, antioxidant activity, clinical and authentication studies of VCO were some of the topics addressed in this review.

Introduction

Coconut oil is extensively used for food and industrial purposes. The oil is rich in medium chain fatty acids (MCFA) and exhibits good digestibility (Che Man & Marina, 2006). Various methods have been developed to extract coconut oil, either through dry or wet processing. Dry processing is the most widely used form of extraction. Clean, ground and steamed copra is pressed by wedge press, screw press or hydraulic press to obtain coconut oil, which then goes through the refining, bleaching, and deodorizing (RBD) processes. During the RBD process, heating process is applied especially during deodorization process, which is carried out at high temperature between 204 and 245 °C (O'Brien, 2004). The copra industry also faced some problems such as contamination by aflatoxin in copra and cake and presence of high free fatty acids due to high moisture content (Guarte, Muhlbauer, & Kellert, 1996).

Recently, there is a trend towards producing coconut oil which does not have to go through the RBD process. Rather than going to the normal dry process, this oil is obtained by wet processing which entails the extraction of the cream from the fresh coconut milk and consequently breaking the cream emulsion. This process is more desirable as no chemical or high heat treatment is imposed on the oil. The coconut oil produced through the wet method is known as virgin coconut oil (VCO).

The term VCO refers to an oil that is obtained from fresh, mature kernel of the coconut by mechanical or natural means, with or without the use of heat and without undergoing chemical refining (Villarino, Dy, & Lizada, 2007). Unlike RBD coconut oil which is tailor-made for cooking purposes, VCO is marketed lately as functional oil. Since its first introduction, virgin coconut oil has captured the attention of vast majority of publics. The beneficial properties of VCO are fast spreading. The availability of VCO is increasing in the market especially in South East Asia involving the Philippine, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

This paper presents an overview of the current status and recent trend of on going research in VCO. Brief explanations on some of the methods used to produce VCO are described. The results of published works on VCO were further reviewed which focused on physicochemical properties, antioxidant activity and phenolic contents, clinical and authentication studies.