The Health Benefits of Topical Virgin Coconut Oil for Preterm Infants – Studies Show Why You want to Massage Your Newborn Baby with Coconut Oil

Most of us who have reached maturity take our body's largest organ at face value, spending a staggering $300 billion on anti-aging globally and approximately $400 million U.S. dollars yearly on over-the counter acne solutions to put on a pretty face. But for the newest and most vulnerable among us, preterm and full-term infants, healthy skin is critical to their very survival, and here is where researchers think virgin coconut oil may be a major contributor in the fight to lower preterm infant mortality. Complications arising from preterm births are the leading cause of death globally for children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organization.

Study of Preterm Infants Confirms Benefits of Coconut Oil for Skin

A 2015 study in India was devised to give scientific authenticity for a traditional Indian practice of massaging newborns' skin with coconut oil. The study was published by the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics, in September 2015 as “Topical Oil Application and Trans-Epidermal Water Loss in Preterm Very Low Birth Weight Infants-A Randomized Trial." The researchers' objective was to determine coconut oil's protection against trans-epidermal water loss (TEWL). There have been many attempts at resolving preterm and term birth water loss among newborns that are more along the technical lines of Western medicine's hospital hardware. This was the first study that focused on the traditional Indian method of massaging the infants with coconut oil. The researchers discovered the coconut oil treated infants had significantly lower TEWL than the group that was not treated topically with coconut oil. Those coconut oil treated newborn infants were without skin bacterial colonization and displayed an overall better quality of skin than the untreated group.