Heart Healthy Olive Oil for Your Heart

Part of living a healthy and active life-style is eating good fats. Olive oil is high in monounsaturated fat and a good source of antioxidants. Olive oil is central to Mediterranean diet that is one of the healthiest in the world. It appears that various levels of total fat (where the fat was mostly olive oil) can be associated with the excellent health as seen in the low mortality rates and low levels of obesity and other diseases in the Mediterranean region.

Good Fats Extend Longevity

Evidence suggests that the traditional diets of southern Italy and many other parts of the Mediterranean region in the 1960's had 30 percent or less of total energy from fat. Data from Greece in the 1960's, however, indicate that the lifestyles prevailing in those years (see below) an intake of over 35 percent of total daily energy from fat was also compatible with good health. Saturated fat was very low and most of the balance of fat in the Mediterranean diet came from monounsaturated fat in olive oil.

In the early 1960's, heart disease rates in the Greek population were found to be nearly 90 percent lower than those measured among U.S. cohorts (Greece had 48 deaths per 100,000 population from ischemic heart disease in men aged 50 to 54, while the United States had 466). At this same time, rates of other chronic diseases were similarly low throughout Greece (breast cancer rates, for example, were one-fourth as low as those of Japan), and Greek male adult life expectancy was the highest in the world. Further, rates of most diet-related chronic diseases were lower in Greece than in other Mediterranean countries.

In the 1960's, researchers believed that olive oil with its high level of monounsaturated fat was neutral with respect to efforts on serum cholesterol and consequently they did not further explore its possible health-promoting potential. Current research reveals that olive oil is very protective.

The Role of Olive Oil in Health

When it comes to incorporating olive oil into your diet keep in mind that

olive oil should always replace - and not be added to - other sources of fat, especially butter and margarine. Butter is rarely featured in the traditional diets of Crete, southern Italy and much of the rest of the Mediterranean. Margarine was completely unknown in the area until recently.

Olive oil is high in linoleic acid, the main polyunsaturated fat in many vegetable oils without negative consequences. Some research has indicated that diets high in monounsaturated fat are less likely to lead to LDL oxidation, and this may reduce atherosclerosis as well as obesity

Mediterranean people have been using olive oil as their major dietary fat for thousands of years. Polyunsaturated fats have been set at higher levels on a wide scale for only a short time and the diets of the Western World have the sad health statistics to prove the damage that polyunsaturated fats have done as a whole to society

Olive oil contains several substances other than monounsaturated fatty acids, such as vitamin E and this also contributes to its status as a healthy food and its qualification to be part of a healthy and active lifestyle program.

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