A decade ago coconut oil was the darling of every wellness shelf in America. It went into coffee, onto skin, into cake batter and stir-fries, and it was sold as a kind of tropical miracle. Then the cardiologists weighed in, and the story got more complicated. Meanwhile olive oil simply kept doing what it has done for several thousand years.
We press olives for a living, so you should read what follows knowing we have a favorite. But the comparison below is built on how each oil is made, what it is made of, and what the research actually found — not on which one we sell. Coconut oil has real uses. It also has a marketing halo it never earned.
How each oil is made
Start with the process, because it explains almost everything downstream.
Extra virgin olive oil is a fruit juice. Olives are crushed into a paste, the paste is gently stirred, and the oil is spun free by centrifuge — mechanically, below 27°C, with no solvents, no heat treatment and no refining. What comes out of the separator is what goes into the bottle. That constraint is the entire reason the oil still carries its polyphenols, its aroma and its peppery bite. We walk through every step on our page on how olive oil goes from grove to bottle.
Coconut oil comes in two very different forms. Virgin coconut oil is pressed from fresh coconut meat and keeps a distinct coconut aroma. Refined coconut oil — the great majority of what is sold for cooking — is made from copra, dried coconut flesh, and is typically bleached and deodorized to remove off-flavors and the smell of the drying process. It is flavorless and white, and it is closer in spirit to a refined seed oil than to anything you would call a juice.
What is actually in the jar
Here the two oils part ways completely.
- Coconut oil is roughly 80–90% saturated fat. The single largest component is lauric acid, at around half the total. That is why it is solid at room temperature and melts at about 24°C (76°F). It contains essentially no polyphenols and no meaningful vitamin E.
- Extra virgin olive oil is roughly 70–80% monounsaturated fat, almost all of it oleic acid, with about 14% saturated fat and a small share of polyunsaturates. On top of that fat base sits a minor fraction — one or two percent by weight — of polyphenols, tocopherols and aromatic compounds that give the oil its flavor, its shelf life and most of its health research. Our science of olive oil page goes through that chemistry in detail.
Calorie for calorie, they are the same: about 120 calories per tablespoon. Everything else is different.
The health question, answered honestly
Coconut oil’s reputation rested on two arguments: that its medium-chain fats are burned quickly for energy, and that it raises HDL, the so-called good cholesterol. Both contain a grain of truth and neither survives close reading.
The medium-chain argument leans on lauric acid, which is technically a 12-carbon fat but is metabolized in the body far more like a long-chain saturated fat than like the shorter chains used in clinical MCT products. And while coconut oil does raise HDL, it raises LDL — the cholesterol fraction most strongly linked to cardiovascular disease — at the same time. In 2017 the American Heart Association issued a presidential advisory that specifically recommended against using coconut oil, on the grounds that it raises LDL cholesterol with no known offsetting benefit. A 2020 meta-analysis of controlled trials published in Circulation found the same thing: compared with non-tropical vegetable oils, coconut oil significantly raised LDL cholesterol.
Olive oil’s evidence runs in the other direction and is considerably deeper. The large Spanish PREDIMED trial found that a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil reduced major cardiovascular events compared with a control diet. Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority permit specific, dose-defined health claims tied to olive oil: the FDA’s qualified claim concerns replacing saturated fat with olive oil’s oleic acid, and the EFSA claim concerns the protection of blood lipids by the oil’s polyphenols. We keep all of this carefully hedged on our page on olive oil and health, because a producer should. But the honest summary is short: one of these oils has a body of research behind it, and the other has a trend.
In the pan: smoke point versus stability
Heat
Refined coconut oil smokes at around 230°C (450°F); virgin coconut oil, closer to 175°C (350°F). A fresh, low-acidity extra virgin olive oil typically smokes somewhere between 190 and 210°C (375–410°F) — comfortably above the temperature of ordinary sautéing, roasting and shallow frying. The smoke point, though, is a poor guide to how a fat actually holds up. What matters is oxidative stability: how much a fat degrades over time at cooking heat. Olive oil’s high oleic content, low polyunsaturates and antioxidant load make it one of the more stable oils under heat, and cooking studies have consistently shown it producing fewer harmful oxidation products than seed oils with higher nominal smoke points. Coconut oil is also very stable — saturated fats are hard to oxidize — so in this one respect the two are closer than the marketing on either side suggests.
Flavor
Virgin coconut oil tastes of coconut, which is wonderful in a Thai curry and a disaster in a Tuscan bean soup. Refined coconut oil tastes of nothing. Extra virgin olive oil tastes of the fruit it came from — grass, artichoke, green almond, pepper — and that flavor is the point: it seasons the dish as it cooks. Only one of the three can be poured raw over bread, a tomato or a finished plate and improve it.
Where each one belongs
- Reach for coconut oil when a recipe wants a solid fat and a tropical note — Southeast Asian curries, certain vegan baking, granola. Treat it as an occasional saturated fat, the way you would treat butter.
- Reach for extra virgin olive oil for nearly everything else: sautéing, roasting, dressings, marinades, cakes, and every dish that is finished with a pour. It is the fat the Mediterranean diet is built on, and the one the research is about.
The comparison that actually matters
The bigger risk in most American kitchens is not choosing coconut oil over olive oil. It is buying an olive oil that no longer has anything olive oil is prized for. A landmark University of California, Davis study found that a majority of imported oils sampled from retail shelves and sold as “extra virgin” failed the sensory standards for the grade. Old, blended, light-struck or quietly refined oil has lost most of its polyphenols — and with them, most of the argument for choosing it at all. We explain how that happens on our page on why supermarket olive oil is usually a false economy.
So compare fats by all means. Then make sure the olive oil you land on is real: a harvest date, a named grove, dark glass, and the bitterness and pepper of an oil that is still alive.
One grove, one harvest, nothing blended
Olive Father is single-source extra virgin olive oil from one family’s groves in Calabria — picked early, milled cold within hours, and bottled with the harvest date on every label. It is the oil we cook with and the oil we finish with, and it has never been near a refinery. See the range and taste what a fruit juice is supposed to do in a pan.
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