Olive Oil And The Maltese: The Mediterranean’s Very Own Magic Potion?
As Mediterranean folk, Maltese people love their olive oil. We add it to our salads, our pasta and of course, our bread. Often-a-time, alongside that magic dash of vinegar, tomatoes, onion, salt, and pepper.
A single tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil is actually 14g of fat, 120 calories. With that in mind, is olive oil really that healthy?
Let’s dive into the facts.
Extra virgin olive oil is fat, but not the bad kind
One time, a group of scientists had human test subjects consume a single meal of fast food, which contained around 40g of pure fat. What did they find? Just what you’d expect – immediate stress within their arteries.
So fat seemed bad. But when the trial was repeated using fat from olive oil instead, the research team noticed a beneficial response in their arteries. Even when the amount of fat was doubled!
Quality matters.
Long living Mediterraneans generally consume lots of olive oil
Greeks and Sardinians are populations boasting some of the longest-lived people on the planet. And they love their olive oil too.
Several studies on centenarians (that is: people who live beyond a hundred years), in these lands, found that they were, in fact, consuming copious amounts of olive oil every, single day.
Countries making use of extra virgin olive oil have shown fewer incidences of stroke and heart disease. Not just because the oil lowers inflammation, but because it prevents bad cholesterol from undergoing a process that clogs the arteries. A process called oxidation.
It differs from other, industrial seed oils
Olive oil comes from a fruit (yes, olives are fruit). Therefore, the oil it produces still retains some of its disease-fighting antioxidants.
This is why other industrial seed oils are terrible for your health.
Oils that come from soybean, hemp, rice bran, sesame, canola, sunflower, corn, vegetable, grapeseed, and even margarine have all been shown to have harmful inflammatory effects on the body.
Particularly when coupled with sugars, they could be very dangerous indeed, to one’s health.
It can help you stay healthy
True, olive oil means calories. But this one time, another group of scientists fed extra virgin olive oil to 7,000 Spanish students and monitored their weight for up to two years.
Surprisingly, none of them gained weight.
You can read all about it here.
That’s not all. Frequent olive oil consumers were scientifically proven to have lower blood sugars, better blood pressures, and lower levels of inflammation.
So what can we say?
The evidence tied to the health benefits of extra virgin olive oil is compelling, so long as it is consumed as part of a whole-food diet otherwise rich in all the good stuff (fruit and vegetables, primarily).
This type of oil does not seem to share the sinister nature of the rest of its oily friends. This, owing to the type of fat found in olive oil (monounsaturated fat, for the nerds out there).
Without question, the Maltese already consume olive oil like there’s no tomorrow. Perhaps there is no reason, now, to fear doing so.
Tag a lover of olive oil!