Coconut

The coconut palm is a tall, slender, feather-leaved tree that can reach thirty metres. Its fruit, botanically a fibrous drupe, has a smooth outer skin, a thick buoyant husk of coir fibre and a hard brown inner shell with three eye-like pores. Inside is the seed: a white layer of firm kernel, the meat, lining a cavity filled with clear coconut water.

Young coconuts contain plenty of water and soft jelly-like flesh, while mature nuts have firm, oil-rich meat. Coconut products include the fresh kernel, desiccated and flaked coconut, coconut milk and cream made by pressing the grated meat, coconut oil, flour, sugar from the sap and the water itself.

The coconut palm is native to the Indo-Pacific tropics, with genetic studies showing two distinct populations, one in the Pacific and one around the Indian Ocean, which were domesticated separately and later mixed. The buoyant fruit floats and can travel long distances on ocean currents, while Austronesian seafarers carried it deliberately across the Pacific.

The word coconut comes from the Portuguese and Spanish coco, meaning grinning face or bogeyman, given by sailors who thought the three pores of the shell looked like a face. The species name nucifera means nut-bearing. In India the palm is called the tree of life, and in the Pacific it is a canoe plant carried by settlers.

Coconut has been central to life across the tropics for thousands of years. In Polynesia and Melanesia the palm provided food, drink, rope, thatch, canoes and oil, and made settlement of remote atolls possible. In South Asia it entered ritual, with the coconut offered in Hindu ceremonies, and Arab and Chinese traders recorded it in the first millennium.

Europeans encountered coconuts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and named them after the Iberian word coco. Colonial plantation systems in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Pacific and the Caribbean developed copra, the dried kernel, as a major export crop for soap, margarine and candles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Today the Philippines, Indonesia and India are the largest producers, and millions of smallholders depend on the palm. Coconut water became a popular sports and health drink in the twenty-first century, and coconut oil became fashionable, though health authorities have cautioned about its saturated fat. Palm diseases and ageing trees pose threats in many producing areas.

Coconut meat is eaten fresh, dried or grated; its pressed milk and cream form the base of curries, soups and desserts across South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, East Africa and the Caribbean. Coconut oil is used for frying, in baking and in cosmetics. Coconut water is drunk fresh, and the flower sap is tapped to make toddy, vinegar and palm sugar.

Desiccated coconut is used in confectionery, cakes and granola, and coconut flour is a gluten-free baking ingredient. Beyond food, the husk fibre becomes coir rope and mats, the shells become charcoal and bowls, and the trunk and leaves are used for building and thatch.

Coconut meat provides fibre, manganese, copper and iron, but its fat is mostly saturated, around ninety percent of the total. Studies show that coconut oil raises LDL cholesterol compared with unsaturated oils, and health bodies such as the American Heart Association advise limiting it.

Claims that coconut oil promotes weight loss or protects against dementia are not well supported by good-quality human evidence. Fresh coconut and coconut milk can be part of a balanced diet in moderate amounts. Coconut water contains potassium and some sugars and is a pleasant drink, not a medical remedy.