Coconut Diet: More Diet Confusion?

Jumping into the bestseller lists is a new book - The Coconut Diet by Cherie Calbom. The book is a based around a 3 week low carb diet with coconut oil as the basis (not unlike another Atkins spin called the Hamptons Diet).

The book opens with this pitch:

Healthy, trim, energetic, and alive! Thats what you can be when you make The Coconut Diet your weight loss secret. With coconut oil, you can watch the pounds melt away.

Don't know about you, but that reads a lot like a spam email. Any diet book that is based around a single food must surely be short on insight. There is no magic food that provides the key to all our weight loss problems - but that doesn't stop authors from deriving a entire diet book from the attributes of a single food.

Coconut oil is a tricky one. We've been told for years that saturated fats (of which palm oils are rich in) are evil, and should be avoided at all cost. Contrary to this, there has been a small but growing argument telling us that saturated fats are good. Of course, this is over-simplifying the argument. However one cannot help but be incredibly confused by the completely contradictive advice out there.

It appears that the source of the confusion is the processing of oils that has gone on during recent decades. Along the way coconut oil got a bad rap.

How can we possibly figure out a way through this nutritional confusion?

Why do we keep on buying books with names like "The Coconut Diet: The Secret Ingredient That Helps You Lose Weight While You Eat Your Favorite Foods"?