In 2001, while living in the Philippines with my family, I became the first person to export a "Virgin Coconut Oil" from the Philippines to the United States.
The product wasn't known as "Virgin Coconut Oil" in the Philippines. It was just known as common "coconut oil" that the poor people made by hand, using traditional methods, because it was cheaper to make this kind of coconut oil from fresh coconuts, than it was to buy the mass-produced machine-made refined coconut oil sold in the grocery stores.
We had spent the previous two years developing our Philippine Herb company in the Philippines, and exporting some of these herbs to the U.S. for the herbal supplement industry.
Handmade coconut oil using traditional methods, was an afterthought for us, but because it was the dietary oil our family was now consuming in the Philippines at that time, we decided to offer it for sale in the U.S. also.
The rest is history, as it quickly became our #1 product, changing so many people's lives that powerful forces tried to destroy us to stop the sale of this simple dietary oil that had nourished tropical populations for thousands of years, with tremendous health benefits.
Those health benefits threatened market share of other products in the U.S., including pharmaceutical drugs and the "newer" polyunsaturated oils that technology made possible after WW II, and today are normally referred to as "vegetable oils" made from corn and soybeans, which today are more than 90% genetically modified (GMO).
I was very fortunate to utilize the emerging technology in 2001, and the growing use of the Internet, to educate the American public about the truth regarding the edible oil industry, and show how the U.S. Government's dietary recommendations through the USDA were faulty, and served the interests of big corporations and had nothing to do with Americans' health.
This was long before Google, Facebook, or Twitter were around filtering information, and when Amazon.com still mostly sold only books.
By 2003, there was strong market demand for Virgin Coconut Oil, and book publishers were contacting me about writing a book, as I had published so much information on coconut oil, including peer-reviewed research on its health benefits, some of which had been around since the 1960s.
I ended up self-publishing our own book in 2004, gathering together 100 of the best testimonies from our customers and readers, and we also hired a professional chef to create some recipes on how to use coconut oil, which were also published in the book.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of copies of this book printed, although most now buy the eBook version. Much of the contents of the book are also published on CoconutOil.com, but if you would like to have a hard copy that will not disappear if the Internet goes down, we are currently offering it for free for a limited time.
