Category: Olive Oil

Is there any oil that’s more beloved in the wellness world than olive oil, a pantry staple so precious that some willingly pay triple digits a bottle? Unlike your standard canola, the taste of olive oil is so darn good that many wouldn’t think twice about taking a swig straight from the bottle or dipping a finger in a small pool of it when they’ve run out of bread.

Here’s the thing: Olive oil’s allegedly low smoke point is a total myth. According to Joseph Profaci, executive director of The North American Olive Oil Association, not only can olive oil withstand a high heat, but extra-virgin olive oil is actually the most stable oil when heated, which was tested and confirmed in a 2018 study published in the journal ACTA Scientific Nutritional Health.

Here, Profaci along with Simon Poole, MD, the author of The Olive Oil Diet, an expert scientific consultant on extra virgin olive oil, and a member of the advisory board of the Olive Wellness Institute, set the record straight on cooking with olive oil.

The truth about olive oil’s smoke point

Profaci says he’s not quite sure where the widespread misconception about olive oil’s low smoke point came from, but somehow it’s everywhere (even in past Well+Good stories). But he argues that the reputation is undeserved.

All fats, including olive oil, have a smoke point. This term is basically a fancy way of identifying the temperature at which fats start to burn and break down when heated. Olive oil has generally been ascribed a smoke point of around 320 to 460 ℉, depending on whether it’s extra-virgin or a more refined type of olive oil. (Extra-virgin oil is made from cold pressed olives; its unrefined nature, people argued, made it more prone to smoking at lower temperatures.) This range places it at a lower smoke point than avocado oil (520℉), coconut oil (350℉), or butter (350℉).

However, Profaci says that the ACTA study debunks a lot of people’s concerns about olive oil’s smoke points. For one thing, researchers found that both regular olive oil and extra-virgin olive oil can withstand temperatures over 475℉, whether on the stove or in the oven. (When sautéing, the temperature is typically 248℉.)

Additionally, the study found that olive oil, even after being heated in a deep fryer for six hours, showed very few signs of chemical breakdown or any harmful by-products that people have feared when eating oils that are heated for too long past their smoke point. “When the olive oil is heated up in these ways, it still maintains the majority of its health benefits,” Profaci says. The benefits may decrease slightly, similarly to how some specific nutrients in vegetables can degrade with cooking, but heat does not destroy the health properties of olive oil.

In fact, Dr. Poole says that olive oil’s nutrients are likely why it can withstand high heat relatively intact. “The polyphenols and antioxidants in particular are so plentiful in extra-virgin olive oil that they prevent oxidation in prolonged heating,” he says. “Coming directly from the fruit of the olive tree—which unlike a seed, has to protect itself much more competently from oxidative pressure in its dynamic relationship with the hot, arid and demanding outside world—nature has demanded that the olive tree with the capacity to preserve its precious fruit from the stress of oxidation in the environment.” These protective benefits, he says, carry over from nature and into the kitchen, too.

What type of olive oil is best for cooking?

Since both refined and extra-virgin olive oil can, in fact, both withstand a high smoke point, you may wonder which one it’s best to cook with. Profaci says this really comes down to two factors: price and flavor. Extra-virgin olive oil, he points out, has more health benefits than refined (or regular) olive oil, as well as more flavor, but it’s also more expensive. It may be more cost effective to cook with refined olive oil and use extra-virgin olive oil as a finishing oil.

“Also, sometimes, you might not want the flavor of olive oil in your food,” Profaci points out. “Since extra-virgin olive oil definitely has a flavor to it, that will depend on whether you want to use it when cooking a certain dish, or if you would rather go with refined olive oil, which has less flavor,” he says. If you’re using olive oil when baking—which yep, you can absolutely do—refined may be a better way to go because of this.

But if you want the food you’re cooking to be as rich in nutrients as possible, Profaci says to go for the extra-virgin, which is more nutrient dense (since it’s less processed). However, whichever type of olive oil you go for, cooking with it will only make your meal healthier.

So, it’s settled: Not being able to cook with olive oil is one cooking myth that’s going up in smoke.

Source: www.wellandgood.com

Written by: Emily Laurence

The health benefits of olive oil include treatment of colon and breast cancer, diabetes, heart problems, arthritis, and high cholesterol. It also aids weight loss, improves metabolism, digestion, and prevents aging. It is a staple ingredient for many culinary preparations and also serves a variety of medicinal purposes. Medical studies suggest that it is loaded with health benefits.

At the Olympia Health & Nutrition Awards conference in Athens, Greece in May, Dr. Khalid El Sayed discussed his research group’s groundbreaking discoveries: oleocanthal, a natural phenolic compound found in extra virgin olive oil, reduced the recurrence of one type of breast cancer in mice and limited the growth of other types of recurrent tumors.

This controlled study in Professor El Sayed’s laboratory at the University of Louisiana at Monroe demonstrated for the first time that oleocanthal can prevent a relapse in one of the four major types of breast cancer, HER2 dependent breast cancer, as well as decreasing the size of other types of breast cancer tumors that appear after treatment. Another study in El Sayed’s lab showed that a therapy that combines oleocanthal with a conventional breast cancer medication may work better than the drug alone. These findings suggest exciting directions for future research into novel alternatives for cancer treatment.

Currently, El Sayed told Greek Liquid Gold, “there is no formal absolute test to predict a relapse, nor a formal drug for recurrence prevention; chemotherapeutic cancer drugs are not really able to kill the dormant tumor cells that cause a relapse.” Since most of the world’s cancer survivors are now under medical surveillance following treatment, more than 12 million patients “are living with the nightmare of watching for their relapse,” as El Sayed puts it. For these survivors and their loved ones, this research is crucial.

Writing in the journal Cancers about their work in El Sayed’s laboratory, Abu Bakar Siddique, Nehad Ayoub, and their group point out that breast cancer (BC) “is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the second-leading cause of cancer-related death in women worldwide. Globally, two million new BC cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2019, with an estimated 627,000 women anticipated to die from BC complications.” Recurrence remains a problem for about 70% of survivors who have had tumors surgically removed and/or have completed radiation therapy or other treatment.

On the other hand, as El Sayed and his team noted, a “wealth of data documents the reduced risk of Mediterranean populations [for] certain chronic diseases typically emerging later in life, … including atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, and particular types of cancer, in addition to extended life expectancy as compared to populations of other geographical regions.” Notably, “these favorable health outcomes have been widely attributed—based on much corroborating epidemiological evidence—to the regular consumption of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), which is a major component of the Mediterranean diet.”

El Sayed told Greek Liquid Gold he believes “daily consumption of quality EVOO can have significant preventive impact.” High quality extra virgin olive oil often contains enough oleocanthal (as well as other helpful components) to provide health benefits, and as Siddique et al wrote in Cancers, olive oil has been used “as food and even remedy throughout human history.” In various studies, oleocanthal from EVOO has shown antioxidant, anti-bacterial, neuroprotective, anti-inflammatory, and anti-cancer activities against breast, prostate, colorectal, and skin cancer.

The type of breast cancer known as HER2-dependent, HER2-amplified, or HER2-positive is a very aggressive kind of cancer which accounts for about 20% of diagnosed breast cancer cases. It is commonly treated with the medication Lapatinib, but tumor cells quickly become resistant to this treatment, making it hard to fight the disease. So this research group embarked on a novel investigation using laboratory animals.

As Siddique and his colleagues report in the journal Nutrients, the group compared the effects of oleocanthal, Lapatinib, and a combination of oleocanthal and Lapatinib (LP), with a control group. They found that the combination therapy was most effective: it reduced cancer cell growth and “significantly inhibited” the invasion and migration of breast cancer cells that often lead to death.

Given evidence that it can reduce cancer cell resistance to treatment with LP, oleocanthal thus shows great promise as part of a combination therapy to treat HER2 breast cancer. This study suggests that such a combination therapy could work better than the current treatment, while reducing the required dose of the medication (LP) to ¼ of the original dose.

However, the required dose of oleocanthal would call for consumption of about 700 ml of the best quality EVOO per day. While many enjoy eating The Governor EVOO from Corfu in Greece that was donated by the Dafnis family as a source of the oleocanthal for this and other related studies, few can consume that much in one day. To treat patients who are ill, it would therefore be necessary to extract pure oleocanthal from EVOO for use as a dietary supplement.

El Sayed’s group developed new ways of doing that, as they explain in the journal Plos One. They believe their new technique for “simplified, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective extraction and purification of EVOO phenolics” will make future studies of olive oil phenolic compounds easier “and expand their therapeutic applications.”

Exploring one such application, the group decided to investigate the possibility that oleocanthal could prevent the recurrence of certain types of breast cancer. There have been few investigations into what might inhibit breast cancer recurrence and metastasis (spreading to distant parts of the body), since sound clinical trials would involve a great deal of time, money, and patients. Yet as breast cancer surgery has shifted to a more conservative strategy of removing less tissue than a traditional mastectomy, there have been more recurrent tumors, many of them leading to death. Successful treatment to reduce recurrence is thus essential.

After establishing a useful novel example of a manageable animal model for a laboratory study, El Sayed’s group discovered that with daily oral treatment with oleocanthal, significantly fewer mice developed recurrent tumors in comparison with the control group, and those that did develop more tumors had much smaller ones. The group also extended their exploration to include the most aggressive breast cancer type, triple negative breast cancer, after making a new oral form of oleocanthal. This prevented 60% of triple negative breast cancer relapses in the mice they studied. These findings offer fresh hope for survivors.

As Siddique et al wrote in Cancers, oleocanthal may provide a better option for longer-term prevention and cancer-free survival as resistance to some treatments increases, given oleocanthal’s “remarkable selectivity to targeting cancer cells,” but not healthy ones, without either a very high cost or evidence of other negative side effects, unlike many cancer treatments. “Natural product-based recurrence inhibitors” like oleocanthal offer another advantage: they could be developed and marketed for use as dietary supplements more quickly than medications, whose development and approval takes a long time.

As El Sayed’s group concludes, oleocanthal may have far-reaching positive effects on breast cancer relapse prevention. Once again, Greece’s liquid gold, olive oil, proves its value–this time for cancer survivors.
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Thanks to Dr. El Sayed for assistance editing this article and for the photos used with it, and thanks to the World Olive Center for Health for sponsoring the Olympia Health & Nutrition Awards ceremony and conference that brought this research to my attention.

All businesses, organizations, and competitions involved with Greek olive oil or agrotourism or food tourism in Greece, as well as anyone else interested in supporting Greeks working in these sectors, are invited to consider the advertising and sponsorship opportunities on the Greek Liquid Gold: Authentic Extra Virgin Olive Oil website. The only wide-ranging English-language website focused on news and information from the Greek olive oil world, it has reached readers in 194 countries around the globe.

Source: greekliquidgold.com

Written by: LISA RADINOVSKY

The olive tree is native to the Mediterranean basin; wild olives were collected by Neolithic peoples as early as the 8th millennium BC. The wild olive tree originated in Asia Minor or in ancient Greece. It is not clear when and where olive trees were first domesticated: in Asia Minor, in the Levant, or somewhere in the Mesopotamian part of the Fertile Crescent.

Olive Oil in Greece through Time
a) Olive Oil in Ancient Greece
In the 8th millennium BC, the Neolithic man had included wild olive fruit in his diet. It is not clear when and where olive trees were first domesticated: in Asia Minor, in the Levant or somewhere in the Mesopotamian part of the Fertile Crescent. Some scientists believe that the first olive trees were planted by the Semite-Hamitic tribes, which inhabited the southern slopes of the Caucasus, the Western Iranian plateaus. Others propose that olive trees were cultivated as early as 6000 BC in Northern Africa, particularly Egypt and Ethiopia. From there, the olive tree and the knowledge of the olive oil production were carried to central and Western Mediterranean countries by Phoenician traders.
In Greece, the history of olive oil is as old as the myths of the Olympus gods. According to archaeological research that took place in islands of the Aegean Sea, fossil olive leaves were found in the volcanic rocks of Santorini and Nisyros islands, dating back 50,000 – 60,000 years. For Greek people, the olive tree has been seen throughout history as a symbol of peace, prosperity, wisdom, victory and the endurance of life itself, evoking feelings of harmony, vitality and health. According to Greek mythology, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, bestowed upon mankind the most useful plant: the olive tree. In the legend, Athena and Poseidon, the god of the ocean, were in competition over who would have the new city-state named after them and become its protector. Poseidon stuck the ground with his trident and gave the Athenians the gift of flowing salt water. Athena planted a seed, which grew to an olive tree on a rocky hill, known today as the Acropolis. She was crowned the winner, as the olive tree provided shelter, nourishment, medicine, heat and trade and the city became known as Athens. The olive tree was worshipped as sacred and its oil was offered to the Gods and the dead. The nutrition, the religion and the art of the ancient Greeks contained elements of the olive. The symbol of the olive tree has very deep roots in Greek tradition, as it symbolizes wealth, health, beauty and abundance and is considered to be a fundamental element of the Greek civilization.
It is estimated that olive cultivation in the Helladic area took place in Crete during the Minoan period, about 3500 BC, as is shown by excavations and findings, such as earthenware jars, recording on tablets, frescos, remains of oil milling stones and decantation basins. The earliest surviving olive oil amphorae date to the Early Minoan period, implying the importance of olive oil in the Minoan civilization where it became a principal product representing wealth. Remains of olive oil have been found in jugs over 4,000 years old in a tomb on the island of Naxos. Archeologists claim that the prosperity of the Minoic civilization was very closely connected to the marketing of olive oil. After 2000 BC, the cultivation of the olive tree in Crete was systematic, playing the most important role on the island’s economy. The oil became a multi-purpose product of the Mycenaean Greece (1600-1100 BC) and was a chief export. The first export of the olive oil, not only in mainland Greece but in Northern Africa and Asia Minor as well, started in Crete. Greece was the biggest producer of “liquid gold” in 1500 BCE and the area most heavily cultivated (particularly Mycenae), as the ancient Greeks exported olive trees to their colonies in the western Mediterranean and the oil was used for trade. With the expansion of the Greek colonies, olive cultivation and culture began to spread across the entire Mediterranean basin. Evans informs us about the importance of olive oil of the economic welfare in the ancient Mediterranean by reporting: “When for an unknown reason, in ancient Crete, trade in olive oil declined, Cretans lost their prosperity and many of them emigrated in parts of central Greece and in coastal areas of Asia Minor”.
Up to the late 7th century BC, the ancient Greeks built their homes around the olive tree, but the use of olive oil was limited. The Greek poet Homer (800-700BC) repeatedly mentioned olive oil in his epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” as the “liquid gold” and believed that only heroes and gods used it for their daily body care, such as to rub their bodies with it. The olive tree was associated with athletic competitions held throughout Greece in ancient times. At the Olympic Games, first held in 776 BC in honor of Zeus, athletes were massaged with olive oil in the belief that the wisdom, power and strength of Athena would be bestowed upon them. The winners were awarded olive leaf crowns and olive oil. Ancient Greeks also believed that if you polished a statue of Zeus with olive oil, Zeus would be so honored that he would grant you a long and happy life. The Spartans and other Greeks rubbed their bodies with oil, while exercising in the gymnasia.
It was after the 6th century that people started using olive oil for food. In the 6th century BC, Solon, the great Athenian legislator drafted the first law for the protection of the olive tree, excluding the uncontrolled felling. The olive tree was considered to be so sacred, as cutting a single tree down was met by death or exile. Ownership of an olive tree was not taken lightly. Olives and olive oil were the only permissible exports in his celebrated laws, implying their great importance. Apart from being consumed as part of a daily nutritional regimen, olive oil was also used widely in the production of perfumes and medicines and in daily life for lighting and heating.
Herodotus (500 BC), the Greek historian, states that Evia, in Central Greece, was full of olive trees during a period where olive cultivation was still unknown to Iran and Babylonia. According to him, Athens was the center of olive cultivation. In the 4th and 5th centuries BC, large areas were under olive cultivation and apart from being a food product, olive oil was also used for medicinal purposes. According to the father of medicine, Hippocrates (460-375BC), olive oil was the “great healer”. It was used in ancient Greece for more than 60 pharmaceutical applications and had the ability to heal various ailments, including the healing of skin problems, stomach aches, ear infections and even mental illness. Aristotle (300 BC) argued that the cultivation of olive trees is science. In his History of Animals, he recommends the use of olive oil as a form of birth control, by applying a mixture of olive oil combined with cedar oil, ointment of lead or ointment of frankincense to the cervix.

b) Olive Oil in Contemporary Greece
From the time of Ancient Greece up to the present, the olive has been regarded as the holiest tree of Greece’s land and is directly connected with the country’s culture and nutrition. Nobel Prize winner Greek poet Odysseas Elytis wrote: “Greece is a vine, an olive tree and a boat”. The Olive Tree, “the tree that feeds the children” according to Sophocles, is the protagonist of Greek nature and the olive oil is the protagonist of the Greek diet. Greece, despite its small size, holds the third place in the world in the olive oil production with 52 Greek cultivars, after Spain and Italy. Today, there are approximately 120,000,000 olive trees in Greece, covering an area of approximately 6 million stremmata (1 stremma = 1000 m² / about ¼ of an acre); 80% of the Greek orchard land is devoted to olive agriculture. Approximately 450,000 Greek families are involved in the cultivation of the olive tree and the processing of its fruit all over the country. The average annual production of olive oil in Greece is around 400,000 tones, of which approximately 250,000 are consumed in the domestic market. The Greeks are today the first consumers of olive oil, compared to any other people and the per capita consumption is approximately 20 kilos annually. About 65% of Greece’s olive oil comes from the Peloponnese, while the rest is produced mainly in Crete, the Aegean and the Ionian islands.
Over 80% of Greece’s olive oil production consists of Extra Virgin Olive Oil with excellent chemical and organoleptic characteristics. The aroma, the flavor, but also the color are the elements that make Greek olive oil distinguishable and justly considered to be one of the best olive oils in the world. The ideal climatic conditions for olive oil, such as mild temperature climate, a lot of sunlight and temperatures without great fluctuation, along with the chemical synthesis of the rocky, arid soil and a variety of unique olive trees (such as the well-known Koroneiki) that do not exist in other oil producing countries, contribute to the production of excellent quality Greek olive oil. Additionally, there is a special relationship with the olive tree that in the end is expressed in the production of excellent quality olive oil mainly with traditional, non-intensive cultivation practices. Most production takes place on small farms and in family-run businesses. Respect, special care and attention are given to the olive tree, as it provides occupation and income for more than 500,000 Greek families. Harvesting of the olive fruits is done the minute they are at the suitable stage of ripeness, in order to give the best quality olive oil. It is done with special care, in most cases by hand, so that the olive fruits are not damaged and the quality of the olive oil is not affected, in spite of the fact, that this way is time-consuming, laborious and consequently more costly. The transportation of the olive fruit to the olive press and its elision for the production of olive oil is carried out in a very short time after harvesting, also contributing to an excellent product of high quality.
Greece complies with the highest quality standards in olive oil production of olive with a Greek label. Due to the high importance of olive oil for the people and the economy of the country, the Greek legislation provides for a systematic quality control of specialized organizations to protect the quality of Greek olive oil. There are now 17 Protected Designations of Origin (PDO), each one producing olive oil with distinct characteristics. The most prized Greek olive variety for the production of olive oil, often called the King of the Grove, is the Koroneiki variety, originating from the area of Korone in Messenia, Peloponnese. This variety grows well on mountain slopes and produces very small fruit, with very high levels of polyphenols, the natural antioxidants found in plants that protect the human body against free radical damage. The olive oil of Koroneiki variety has a complex aroma, often with subtle hints of other herbs and vegetation growing in or near the groves. It is a particularly fruity variety, with plenty of grassy tones and also flavors reminiscent of bitter almond and spicy pepper. In addition to its rich flavor and vivid color, the olive oil of this highly prized variety also boasts low free fatty acids (less than 0.3%) and a long shelf-life.