What to Do with Coconut – Real Food Basics

Coconuts are by far one of my favorite foods!! So healthy, so good, and so filling. I love that you can use every part of the coconut, both the flesh as coconut chips or grated coconut, coconut butter (ground up shredded coconut), coconut flour (ground from dried, defatted coconut meat), coconut water, and coconut milk.

You can use coconut for both breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, and dessert. Coconut oil is a healthy cooking fat as it’s quite heat stable and doesn’t contain any omega-6 fatty acids that promote inflammation in the body. Coconut milk is easy to use in smoothies and in both cooking and baking, and coconut flour can be used to make gluten free bread and desserts.

The only coconut product I personally don’t use is coconut sugar, for many reasons. First of all I have chosen to avoid all added sugar, even natural added sugars such as cane sugar, honey, agave, coconut sugar, etc. And second of all, I love coconuts too much to be able to be OK with coconut sugar. What do I mean with that? Well, when you make coconut sugar, you take the nectar from the coconut palm tree, and there then won’t be any coconuts grown on the tree. I don’t want to support using a sugar that hinders valuable food from being made! Coconut palm trees that are used for making coconut sugar later also have a hard time starting to grow coconuts again, which is another reason why I wouldn’t want to use coconut sugar even if it were healthy. But “thankfully” coconut sugar is still sugar, just not as processed as white table sugar, so for me it’s an easy decision to just avoid coconut sugar all together. If you want to read more about the problem with coconut sugar, click here.

What to make with coconut: