The Official Newsletter of Bodyfatguide.com
updated November 1, 2011
Dr.
Oz's Questionable Advice on Coconut Water
by Ron Brown, Ph.D., author of The Body Fat Guide
Dr.
Oz's Questionable by Ron Brown, Ph.D., author of The Body Fat Guide
"Ron Brown is a certified fitness trainer who doesn't have an inch of flab on his body. He'll tell you what you can do to become fit and trim too."
TALK TO AMERICA, Washington DC
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WHEN I recently
read Dr. Oz's newspaper column, in which he and his partner Dr. Roizen
questioned coconut water as a sports drink because of the high amount of sodium
it contained, red flags immediately appeared in my mind. I have been using
coconut water, one of the healthiest drinks in nature, and recommending coconut
water fresh from young coconuts for some time, and I have never detected an
alleged high sodium content in coconut water. What was Dr. Oz talking about?
So, I went to the USDA Database of Nutrients to double check the nutrient facts on coconut water. To my surprise, I found that the USDA nutrient values perfectly matched the values reported by Dr. Oz and Dr. Roizen for coconut water, including a 250 mg. value for sodium per cup. Could this be true? Did coconut water consumption really pose a hidden health risk from high sodium content in addition to the benefits I had read about? Was coconut water no longer a worthy candidate as the ultimate sports drink to naturally replenish important electrolytes like calcium and potassium? I immediately recalled an article in a peer-reviewed journal that described how coconut water was used intravenously for medical emergencies (Campbell-Falck, Thomas, Falck, Tutuo, & Clem, 2000). I looked up the article and noticed it contained a table of coconut water composition with listings from various researchers. So I double checked the calculations for sodium content. In the table for coconut water in the article, mEq/L values for sodium are listed as 5.0, 4.2, 0.7, 5.0, 4.0, 2.9, 9.7. If we throw out the high and low values, the mean value for sodium is 4.22 mEq/L. One mEq of sodium equals 23 mg. Therefore there are about 97 mg. of sodium in a liter of coconut water, or only about 23 mg. of sodium in one cup of coconut water, not 250 mg. reported by Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz was off by over 10 times the actual amount of sodium in coconut water! |
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In fairness to Dr. Oz, the USDA Database is the real culprit. How
could the USDA report such a large difference in sodium values? Did the USDA use
different types of coconuts to analyze coconut water? No. A more likely
explanation is that someone at the USDA goofed and forgot to put a decimal point
before the zero in 250 mg., correcting it to 25.0 mg. of sodium per cup of
coconut water, which puts it well within the range of values found by other
researchers. When it comes to the value of coconut water, it's nice to know that
Nature got it right, despite questionable advice and faulty information reported
by biomedical practitioners and a federal government agency.
References: Campbell-Falck, D., Thomas, T., Falck, T. M., Tutuo, N., & Clem, K. (2000). The intravenous use of coconut water. American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 18, 108–111. |
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