Coconut oil offers many health benefits for dogs and cats ranging from moisturizing and healing dry, cracked pads to helping promote healthy bones and joints and fight diseases like heart diseases and diabetes. Coconut oil is also anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-parasitic and anti-fungal and offers a host of benefits related to these valuable properties.

Many nutritionists and holistic physicians believe that both people and pets should use coconut oil in their diets regularly.

Many of the numerous health benefits of coconut oil are attributed to unique key ingredients: omega fats, lauric acid, capric acid, caprylic acid. Lauric acid is a rare medium-chain fatty acid found in human breast milk and it makes up about 50% of coconut oil. Lauric acid supports healthy metabolism.

There are three kinds of fatty acids: Long-chain fatty acids (LCFA), Medium Chain Fatty Acids (MCFA), and Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFA). Most of the fats, by far, that we eat as Americans (including fats in meat, dairy products, margarine, vegetable oils and shortening) are from animals or plants and are composed of long-chain fatty acids (LCFA). Coconut oil is made of mostly medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs).

Coconut Oil for Weight Loss

Bodies respond to and metabolize each fatty acid differently. The fatty acids in coconut oil are predominately medium-chain fatty acids, which are quite unusual in the typical American diet. The MCFAs in coconut oil are what cause it to have so many health benefits. Among other differences, MCFAs are more prone to create energy instead of turning to fat when metabolized, which may make them helpful regarding weight loss.

Coconut oil is also believed to promote healthy thyroid function and promote a healthy metabolism, two more crucial aspects to losing weight and maintaining healthy weight.

For thousands of years the coconut has been a nutritious source of meat, juice, milk, and oil that has fed and nourished millions of people. In those tropical areas of the Asia and Pacific, such as the Phillipines, where coconuts grow and compose a major portion of the native diet, the population enjoys a high degree of lean body mass and health metabolic rates without many of the rates of diseases such as heart disease and cancer that we have in our country.

(Did you know our hand-made, gourmet fresh-baked dog cookies are made with coconut oil? It costs us a little more to make them but these are for the REALLY good girls and good boys and they're worth it. Also have birthday cookies and "Prince" and "Princess" cookies. Yummy yogurt frosting is pink for girls, blue for boys. Check 'em out!)
(Nice try. Cookies are not a substitute for supplementing with coconut oil.) :)

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Please do not use coconut oil or any other supplement to treat an illness or condition in your pet without consulting your pet's veterinarian.