Do You Really Know Why Extra Virgin Olive Oil Is The Healthiest Fat?
Updated December 1st 2022
- The Health Benefits Of Extra Virgin Olive Oil Are Backed By Science From Across The World
- Extra Virgin Olive Oil Is Full Of Nutrients, Antioxidants and Polyphenols
- Choosing An Unsaturated Fat Like Olive Oil Can Protect Against Heart Disease And Cholesterol
- Morocco Gold Is A Premium Single Source Extra Virgin Olive Oil Made From Cold Pressed Olives
Extra virgin olive oil is known to be the healthiest fat in the world. It’s a bold but entirely supportable theory – backed by some of the most robust science worldwide. It’s a staple in any healthy diet and is available in many different varieties, but do you actually know why? Fear not – there’s nothing we like reminding you of more!
Extra virgin olive oil is unrefined and extracted from olives without the use of chemical solvents or heat, which preserves its maximum levels of nutrients like vitamins A and E, essential fatty acids, antioxidants, as well as polyphenols. This helps contribute to its many health benefits such as providing anti-inflammatory properties and helping to reduce bad cholesterol levels.
Extra virgin olive oil can greatly benefit your overall long-term health if consumed regularly in addition to being used in cooking. The next time you’re looking for a delicious way to boost your nutrient intake make sure you opt for extra virgin olive oil!
Extra Virgin Olive Oil: The Case For Unsaturated Fats
Olive oil is an unsaturated fat rather than a saturated fat. This means that it is the healthy kind of fat. Best olive oil like Morocco Gold extra virgin olive oil is also high in polyphenols, which protect against harmful free radicals deliver the many health benefits such as protection against ldl cholesterol and heart disease.
Dietary fats are an essential part of a healthy diet according to the American Heart Association. The right fats provide energy, improve cell growth and absorption of nutrients, and create important hormones. To remain healthy, we need moderate amounts of the right type of fats eaten as part of a good, balanced healthy diet. However, we need to ensure we are taking the right kind of fat.
Which Fats Contribute To A Healthy Diet?
Fats are made up of fatty acids and glycerol. A fatty acid consists of a chain of carbon atoms, where each carbon atom in the chain is attached to hydrogen atoms. The number of hydrogen atoms per carbon atom determines whether the fatty acid is saturated or unsaturated and therefore will contribute towards a healthy diet.
What Are Saturated Fats?
If a fatty acid has all of the hydrogen atoms it can hold (2 per carbon atom in the chain) and all of the carbon atoms in the chain are linked by single bonds, it is described as saturated.
Saturated fats are usually solid or semi-solid at room temperature and are strongly associated with raised blood cholesterol which is why nutritionists recommend eating them as little as possible. Lard, butter, hard cheeses, whole milk, animal fats and palm and coconut oils – plus products containing them – all contain high levels of saturated fat that do not support a healthy diet.
Monounsaturated Fats Support A Healthy Diet
If a pair of carbon atoms in the fatty acid chain is linked by a double bond instead of a single bond, the fatty acid is described as monounsaturated. Fats rich in monounsaturates tend to be liquid at room temperature. Olive oil is one of the richest sources of monounsaturated fatty acids and therefore supports a healthy diet.
Monounsaturated fats—omega-6s in the case of olive oil—are important because they help boost heart health. This is important for helping prevent health issues such as cardiovascular disease or stroke.
What Are Polyunsaturated fats
These contain more than one double bond and are liquid at room temperature. The main sources are vegetable oils, such as sunflower oil, corn oil and rapeseed, but not tropical oils such as coconut, palm and palm kernel oils.
Trans Fats
Trans fats are created when a hydrogenation process is applied to solidify oil for use in margarines or to improve a product’s shelf life. This processing causes trans fats to act like saturated fats.
The following illustrates the differing fat contents of a range of products.
Why Do The Polyphenols In Extra Virgin Olive Oil Make It So Healthy?
However, it’s not just about the kind of fat molecules that they are made up of, extra virgin olive oil has some extra magic. The biggest thing that makes extra virgin olive oil so healthy is its unique disease-fighting component.
Thanks to the recent spotlight on the Mediterranean Diet, extensive research has been done on the phytonutrient composition of olive oil. What has been discovered is an extensive list of phytonutrients; one of the most praised is its polyphenols. The amount of polyphenols found in extra virgin olive oil is truly amazing!
What Are Polyphenols?
Polyphenols are a group of over 500 phytochemicals, which are naturally occurring micronutrients in plants. These compounds give a plant its colour and can help to protect it from various dangers. When you eat plants with polyphenols, you reap the health benefits as well.
Polyphenols In Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Polyphenols are a key component in extra virgin olive oil and are considered to be one of the best health enhancing benefits within the oil. Polyphenols are a potent antioxidant – one that can decommission a nasty molecule in your body called free radicals. Free radicals can ricochet around inside your body and harm good cells. Antioxidants, such as the polyphenols found in extra virgin olive oil, work to neutralize free radicals, protecting the body from their harmful effects. It’s also thought that polyphenols contribute to keep the body being in an anti-inflammatory state. This is also associated with a lower risk of several chronic diseases.
Morocco Gold Extra Virgin Olive Oil Is High In Polyphenols
The high polyphenol content of Morocco Gold extra virgin olive oil is dependent on three factors. First is the variety of the olive, secondly the climate and terroire of the growing region and thirdly the actual time in the growing season that the crop is harvested.
Morocco Gold is pressed from the Picholine Marocaine, the only type of olive to go into Morocco Gold. Oil from this variety is renowned for it’s high polyphenol count, oxidative stability and longevity.
Our olives are grown in a valley that is about 2,000 feet above sea level. This helps to create the additional climatic challenges that encourage polyphenol uptake within the olive tree. It is also an area with naturally occurring high phenols in the soil itself.
In soils, phenols are released over extended period of time from decomposing plant materials. This causes complex organic compounds to be slowly oxidized or to break down into simpler forms of sugars, amino sugars, aliphatic and phenolic organic acids. These are further transformed into microbial biomass or are reorganized, and further oxidized, into humic assemblages (fulvic and humic acids), which bind to clay minerals.
There has been a long debate about the ability of plants to uptake humic substances through their root systems and to metabolize them. There is now a consensus about how humus plays a hormonal role rather than simply a nutritional role in plant physiology. Olive trees grown in ‘challenging’ conditions encourage the uptake of naturally occurring phenols in the soil. This in turn aids the circulatory system within the olive tree, with the phenols eventually finding their way to the olive fruit itself.
Thirdly, our olives are picked when the fruit is young and green. As the olives age on the tree, the colour of the olive changes to red and then black, the size of the olive increases thus producing more oil, but the polyphenol level decreases. There is a great deal of expertise within the farming community where we source our oil to ensure that the harvest is collected at the optimum time to maximise the polyphenol level.
Types Of Polyphenols
There are a number of different types of polyphenols in Extra Virgin olive oil, including oleuropein, tyrosol, hydroxytyrosol, oleocanthal and oleacein. Each are considered extremely strong antioxidants, and are linked to a number of different benefits, including:
- Maintenance of normal blood pressure
- Keeping the upper respiratory tract healthy
- Protecting proteins in the brain that are involved in memory, learning and thinking
- Helping to keep blood sugar under control
- Treating the symptoms of and/or preventing type 2 diabetes
- Protecting blood lipids from oxidative damage
- Acting as an anti-inflamatory
Why Choose Extra Virgin Olive Oil?
There are many reasons why people choose extra virgin olive oil like Morocco Gold over other types of oils. Whether this is extra virgin olive oil as part of a healthy diet, extra virgin olive oil for its delicious taste or extra virgin oil because of its now well-researched and documented health benefits. Extra Virgin Olive Oil is probably the most extensively researched foodstuff on the planet and the health benefits are evidence based.
