 Back to olive oil. You've heard me to say over and over again that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth. Is olive oil really that good for you? Well, if you remember, olive oil Omega 9, a mono-insaturated fat, isn't either good or bad. It is really kind of a fairly neutral fat. But the benefit of olive oil is the amount of polyphenols that it carries. Interesting fun fact, polyphenols are in the fruits of plants, and they're there actually, as you've heard me say, as a protection, among other things against sunburn, among other things against predators, particularly insect predators, and surprisingly, the polyphenols in fruit leaves are actually more concentrated than in the fruit. So that's why I take olive leaf extract, because the polyphenols are actually higher in the leaves than they are in the olives. The olives are another great source of polyphenols, but when you press those olives, depending on the polyphenol concentration in the olives, that's the benefit of the olive oil, and that's why I always tell you more bitter, more better in terms of olive oil, because that bitterness is the polyphenols that you're taking. So the olive oil is there to get polyphenols in your mouth. Now, I don't think it's without a chance that two of the longest living blue zones use a liter of olive oil per week in their diet, and that's Sardinia and Crete. There are other blue zones that I write about in Acheroli where olive oil is also a huge part of their diet, but perhaps the best study backing the benefit of olive oil is the Predomed trial in Spain, which is a recent trial where they took people very much like the Lionheart study, where people had an initial heart attack and were given a stem, and these were people 65 years of age, and they were randomized into three groups. Now, for simplicity, we'll kind of not dwell. Well, yeah, we will, because it's an oil. So everybody had to follow a Mediterranean diet. One group followed a low-fat Mediterranean diet. A second group had to use a liter of olive oil per week, and they had to go back to the clinic once a week, turn in their old bottle of olive oil, and pick up a new one. So they knew exactly what people were doing. The third group ate the same diet, except they had to eat the equivalent number of calories in nuts, particularly walnuts. They were followed for five years. The initial trial was actually to look at new events of coronary artery disease. So the olive oil group and the nut group had a dramatic reduction in new events, approximately a 30% reduction, compared to the low-fat Mediterranean diet group. But the trial, what the trial found, was expanded into other areas, and one of those was memory. And what they found was the people in the olive oil group, and to a lesser extent the nut group, had improved memory at the end of five years, in other words, when they were seven years old, then they started with compared to the low-fat group, who actually memory, as you might have expected, declined during those five years. And as you'll learn in the energy paradox, what they found was that the olive oil group had a dramatic reduction in the amount of a fat called ceramides in their blood, compared to the no olive oil group that had a high level of ceramides in their blood. You're going to learn all about ceramides, because ceramides are manufactured by your mitochondria from palmitate, from palmitic acid. And guess where palmitic acid comes from? You make it from fructose. It's the only place in your diet that you get it. And so what they found was, and what I urge people to do in the energy paradox, is you want to reduce your ceramides. You want to reduce your ceramide production. And as one paper that I cite, famously said, death by ceramides. And if you want to lose memory, if you want to lose energy, then by all means increase your ceramide production. And if you want to gain energy and gain memory by everything that you can do, decrease your ceramide production, and olive oil helps to reduce ceramide production. Another huge reason to get that olive oil into you. Okay, what about olive oil raises cholesterol? Well, if you like the cholesterol theory of heart disease, and that is one theory of heart disease, then you should know that if you like that theory, that it's small, dense balls of LDL cholesterol that have the potential to oxidize. And oxidation is actually, if you like the cholesterol theory of heart disease, is the problem with small, dense cholesterol. What's fascinating in my work, and other people's work, is that the polyphenols in olive oil actually reduce the oxidation of LDL cholesterol, which may be why high olive oil use, like in the Predominid study, dramatically decrease the new incidence of coronary artery disease in that study versus a low fat diet. Now, do cholesterol levels go up on olive oil? Many times they do. But that has nothing to do with oxidized cholesterol, as I constantly reassure my patients, and has nothing to do with whether or not you should lower your cholesterol. Now, what about olive oil being a fat? And there's nine calories of fat per gram of olive oil versus, or any oil, versus only four calories per gram of protein or carbohydrates. So there's twice as many calories per gram of olive oil, of any oil, as there is in protein or carbohydrates. But one of the fascinating things that has been born by multiple studies is that a calorie is not a calorie. And you're going to learn this over and over again in the energy paradox. And that explains actually why in the Predominid study, despite consuming a liter of olive oil per week, that's about 10 to 12 tablespoons of olive oil per day. And eating the equivalent calories in nuts, which is mostly fat, the nut group and the olive oil group actually lost weight over the five years of the study, despite being forced to have 10 to 12 tablespoons of olive oil per day versus the low fat group that actually gained weight during that study. And that's because we take the calories, particularly in carbohydrates, particularly in fruits, and convert them into fat, particularly palmitate, to store fat for the winter. Just exactly like a great ape does during the summer fruit season, just like a bear does during huckleberry and blueberry season. We make fat from carbohydrates. Never, ever forget that. What about coconut oil? Don't you say saturated fats are bad? Well, it turns out that coconut oil actually does have a benefit. It also has polyphenols, but for you polyphenol fans, there are 10 times more polyphenols in olive oil than there are in coconut oil. So, coconut oil does have polyphenols, but it's still not the polyphenol giant. One of the benefits of coconut oil is it is a great cooking oil because it has a very high smoke point. Now, that brings me back to olive oil. Olive oil must be bad for you because it starts smoking at low temperature, so that means it's oxidized and oxidized fats are really bad for you. As many of you who listen to the podcast know, we've had one of the world's greatest olive oil experts on the podcast. Olive oil is the least oxidizable oil of any oil. It actually beats coconut oil in terms of not being oxidized with high heat. 5,000 years of recorded history of cooking with olive oil, something must be going right with cooking with olive oil. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in most of the longest-lived people's diets. So, just because something smokes at a low temperature has nothing to do with whether that oil is oxidized. So, quite frankly, I cook in olive oil. I also cook in sesame oil, which brings me to my next point. Sesame oil is primarily a fat of the omega-6 chain. And so, gosh, it must be bad for it. But as I study cultures around the world, I've noted that particularly in Middle East cultures, there is a huge amount of sesame eaten and sesame oil being used, the Japanese fry in sesame oil. And anytime I see a culture using an oil like Koreans use perilla oil, I always want to do a deep dive into why they're doing that. And it turns out with sesame oil, as you're going to learn about in the energy paradox, there's some beautiful paper showing that the omega-6 fat in sesame oil not only reduces inflammation, but actually dramatically improves blood pressure. In a beautiful human trial, people with high blood pressure were asked to take two tablespoons of sesame oil, plain sesame oil, not toasted, a day for 28 weeks. And all of them, these are people with high blood pressure. Their blood pressure normalized while they were on the sesame oil. They then removed the sesame oil from their diet and their blood pressure returned to the high levels. So after reading that paper and incorporating it into my and my other patients with high blood pressure program, we've noticed in our patients with high blood pressure that their blood pressure is starting to come down quite dramatically if I can get them to use two tablespoons of sesame oil. Now the great thing about sesame oil is it's flavorless and it has a high smoke point. So you can cook with it, you can mix it in with your olive oil. I'm cooking it half and half with olive oil now. I mix it into my salad dressings. I take a tablespoon of sesame oil every day as part of my regimen. So sesame, the components, the polyphenols in sesame have some fascinating anti-inflammatory processes that properties that we really need to be aware of and you need to be aware of. Same way with perill oil. You know I've been a fan of perill oil for many years. It also has a lot of ALA, alpha-lenolac acid in it, plus it has another cool component called rosemaryic acid which is rosemary and rosemaryic acid has tremendous brain supporting powers. That's why the aceroles in southern Italy chew rosemary constantly and have rosemary in every one of their dishes and they have more people over 100 per population than anywhere in the world. 30% of that town is over 100 and they're thriving and I have trouble chasing them up hills. Okay, so that's why these oils not only aren't bad for you but should be a part of every one of our diets. So critics out there, I'm sorry, Ansel Keys loved his olive oil and I'm sorry his research from the 1950s needs a little updating and please look at the human trials, look at the animal trials. One of our greatest neurologists, Dr. Bredesen, my colleague, Dale Bredesen recommends olive oil. Neurologists know that there are benefits in olive oil that far outweigh any possible risk there might be in ingesting it and oil is not an oil is not an oil. It's what the oil is bringing to you in terms of its components and if you really, want to increase the amount of bad oils in your body then please eat a low fat standard American heart diet with lots of carbohydrates and lots of fruit and you will manufacture those bad oils. And I've written papers about this if you want to kick up your triglycerides which are the number one risk factor in heart disease please eat a low fat high carbohydrate diet you'll do just that and I've documented this in my patients and published papers on it so our heart recommendation our heart diet recommendations are flat wrong. More amazing episodes just like this one watch now. Now sometimes in America we see the words nuvo olio or nuvo olive oil is is that a sign that these were picked greener? It can be a sign usually it's a sign of freshness but