There are significant differences in the way bodies metabolize the different saturated fatty acids. Sometimes the metabolic pathways compete with one another, so ratios can matter as much as raw quantity.
If you just go by total saturated fat content, without looking at the specific chemical components, you can't tell the difference between coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and palm oil.
While anything you eat has the potential to be terrible for you at a certain level of consumption, a certain level of specificity is called for. Someone who has chosen coconut oil as their staple fat has made a conscious effort to eat more lauric acid and less palmitic acid or stearic acid. If it was just a matter of saturated fat versus unsaturated fat, and they wanted to eat more saturated, they could have chosen the much cheaper palm oil or pork lard.
Even if the person chooses to eat minimal saturated fat, there are still great differences in the available dietary fats. Is it rich or poor in omega-3 and omega-6? Have any double bonds flipped from cis-bonds to trans-bonds? Are the fatty acids free or still attached to a glycerol? Does the eater have any genetic conditions that make a particular metabolic pathway slower, limited by the presence of some other nutrient, or absent entirely?
In general, we still don't know a lot about the specifics of fat metabolism. As long as there is an excess of carbohydrate in the body, lipids are generally used as building blocks of the body--like amino acids from protein--rather than for energy. They come in many shapes and sizes, like LEGO blocks, except unlike those hard plastic blocks and bits, the body can cut and bend and reshape its lipids within certain metabolic constraints.
If any particular building block is in excess, the body usually just makes more of whatever the default structure is for that piece. Too much stearic acid might get hooked together with a glycerol and dumped into the oil drop in a white adipose cell. Too much palmitic acid might get rolled into LDL cholesterol. Too much lauric acid could get put into HDL cholesterol. We don't really know for sure what the body does when the ratios are off, or what the perfect balance of ratios is.
There are significant differences in the way bodies metabolize the different saturated fatty acids. Sometimes the metabolic pathways compete with one another, so ratios can matter as much as raw quantity.
If you just go by total saturated fat content, without looking at the specific chemical components, you can't tell the difference between coconut oil, palm kernel oil, and palm oil.
While anything you eat has the potential to be terrible for you at a certain level of consumption, a certain level of specificity is called for. Someone who has chosen coconut oil as their staple fat has made a conscious effort to eat more lauric acid and less palmitic acid or stearic acid. If it was just a matter of saturated fat versus unsaturated fat, and they wanted to eat more saturated, they could have chosen the much cheaper palm oil or pork lard.
Even if the person chooses to eat minimal saturated fat, there are still great differences in the available dietary fats. Is it rich or poor in omega-3 and omega-6? Have any double bonds flipped from cis-bonds to trans-bonds? Are the fatty acids free or still attached to a glycerol? Does the eater have any genetic conditions that make a particular metabolic pathway slower, limited by the presence of some other nutrient, or absent entirely?
In general, we still don't know a lot about the specifics of fat metabolism. As long as there is an excess of carbohydrate in the body, lipids are generally used as building blocks of the body--like amino acids from protein--rather than for energy. They come in many shapes and sizes, like LEGO blocks, except unlike those hard plastic blocks and bits, the body can cut and bend and reshape its lipids within certain metabolic constraints.
If any particular building block is in excess, the body usually just makes more of whatever the default structure is for that piece. Too much stearic acid might get hooked together with a glycerol and dumped into the oil drop in a white adipose cell. Too much palmitic acid might get rolled into LDL cholesterol. Too much lauric acid could get put into HDL cholesterol. We don't really know for sure what the body does when the ratios are off, or what the perfect balance of ratios is.