All About Olive Oil

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small 😎

❝Skip the video & tell more about olive oil please.❞

We love requests!

We can’t really do anti-requests (e.g. “skip the video”) because for every one person who doesn’t care for one particular element of the newsletter, there will be thousands who do—and indeed, the video segment is a popular one, so it will certainly remain.

However! Let us reassure you that you personally are not obliged to watch the video if you don’t want to 🙂 In fact, our general hope with 10almonds is that there will be at least one feature that is of value to each reader, each day.

Writer’s note: I’m a very bookish person, and in honesty do not love videos personally either. You know what I do love though? Olive oil. So let’s get onto that 😎

Why olive oil?

Let’s quickly address the taste/culinary side of things first, and then spend more time on the health aspects. Olive oil’s strong punchy flavor (as oils go, anyway) makes it a big winner with those of us who love strong punchy flavors. However, it does mean that it can overwhelm some more delicate dishes if one isn’t careful, meaning that it’s not perfect for everything all the time.

Healthwise, olive oil is one of the healthiest oils around, along with avocado oil. In fact, we compared them previously:

Avocado Oil vs Olive Oil – Which is Healthier?

…and it’s worth noting that their (excellent) lipids profiles are very similar, meaning that the main factor between them is that olive oil usually retains vitamins that avocado oil doesn’t.

Meanwhile, another popular contender for “healthy oil” is coconut oil, but this doesn’t have nearly as unambiguously good a lipids profile, because of coconut oil’s high saturated fat content—though lauric acid can have a cardioprotective effect, so the jury is out on that one:

Olive Oil vs Coconut Oil – Which is Healthier?

Interestingly, this article from The Conversation considered seed oils (canola, sunflower, sesame) to be next-best options:

I can’t afford olive oil. What else can I use?

…but it’s worth noting that the way those seed oils are made varies a lot from country to country, and can affect their health impact considerably.

It’s not just about the fats

Olives, especially green olives with their stronger more pungent flavor, are rich in assorted polyphenols that have many health-giving properties:

Black Olives vs Green Olives – Which is Healthier

…and olive oil is almost always made from green olives. Note that while we picked black olives in the above comparison, that’s mainly because green olives are “cured” for longer and thus are much higher in sodium… Which, guess what, isn’t in olive oil, so with olive oil we can enjoy all of the polyphenols with almost none of the sodium!

Let’s talk virginity

When it comes to olive oil, definitely not everything labelled as olive oil in the supermarket is of the same quality. Mostly, however, it’s not whether it’s “extra virgin” (i.e. the oil from the first mechanical pressing) or not that actually makes the biggest health difference, so much as that olive oils are often adulterated with other cheaper oils, so it’s important to check labels for that, even when they say “extra virgin”, in case it’s something like:

_{^{a blend of}}
EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
_{^{and other oils}}

We talk about this, and the various different levels of quality of olive oil and how you can tell them apart for yourself in the supermarket (and be wise to the ways they may try to trick you), here:

Is “Extra Virgin” Worth It?

What to enjoy it with?

Olive oil is the single largest source of fat in the Mediterranean diet, and by that we mean not just “food that is eaten in the Mediterranean”, but rather, the well-defined dietary approach that has for a long time now been considered “the gold standard” of what a healthy diet looks like, scientifically. You can read more about what is and isn’t included in the definition, here:

Mediterranean Diet: What Is It Good For? ← what isn’t it good for!

Enjoy!