Olive oil: the ultimate superfood

We caught a great podcast recently by olive oil champion Elizabeth Berger and scientist Prof Tim Spector, olive oil evangelist and founder of science and nutrition app Zoe. Berger is the founder of Frantoi, which works with growers and olive millers across Italy to produce exceptional extra virgin olive oils.

The health benefits of a Mediterranean diet are well-known, but do you know why? In their podcast, the pair discuss how transformative extra virgin olive oil can be, from the oleic acid and polyphenols in it protecting the body from cardiovascular disease, to regulating blood sugar, helping to prevent strokes and certain cancers, plus a remarkable link between extra virgin olive oil and long-term brain function.

But it has to be the right kind of oil. Naturally extracted, extra virgin olive oil is essentially freshly-pressed juice. It has its own set of natural preservatives, and it’s full of naturally-occurring antioxidants and polyphenols which give extra virgin olive oil – including ours – a shelf life of around 18 months. Not bad for a fresh product, eh?

Extra virgin olive oil is the highest grade of oil you can get. Its level of free acidity has to sit below 0.8%. Under that, you have the lower grades of virgin olive oil and plain old olive oil, which you see on supermarket shelves, and probably have a little extra virgin olive oil blended into them to give them flavour. I suppose what we’re saying is, read the label carefully. If it doesn’t say extra virgin olive oil, it’s not the read deal and it won’t have all of those health benefits Elizabeth and Tim talk about in their podcast. Sant’Elia oil is as natural as it gets.

Extra virgin olive oil isn’t cheap to produce, and there’s a reason it’s more expensive than blended oils. There’s a great deal that goes into the production process, and a lot of specialist knowledge required to know just when to pick. In the podcast, Elizabeth says you get what you pay for – green olives are firm, black olives are softer and riper. And although you’ll get more juice from a black olive, a green olive will give you a much higher quality oil. That’s what we use. It takes around 7kg of olives to produce a litre of oil. And each cultivar, of which there are 600 in Italy alone, will give you a slightly different flavour.

Come October, our olives are hand-picked by us and immediately taken to the local village’s frantoio – the traditional olive mill – and pressed in the way they’ve been for centuries. We love being part of that long, artisan tradition, and the privilege isn’t lost on us. It’s wonderful.

Because we’re so involved in the process, from picking to bottling, we can press our within 24 hours of harvest. The oxidisation process begins the moment they’re detached from the tree and so we have to move quickly. Ours are pressed using only mechanical means – none of the heat or chemicals used with commercially produced supermarket oil. The lower grades of olive oil rely on additional production – ie more pressing, to extract as much as possible from the fruit, so it’s less pure and the health benefits are less.

In another vote for eating seasonally – and you know we’re all about that in Italy – the quicker you consume oil after pressing, the more polyphenols there are in it – and the health benefits of those are immense. As Elizabeth says, it’s like taking a wheatgrass shot.

“If you're looking for something that could help everything from, prevent dementia, cancer, your immune system, your gut health, your heart, this is something that is worth paying for,” says Tim. “Everyone should be switching to olive oil, you know, it's the simplest thing you can do for your health.”

The whole podcast is absolutely fascinating. You can listen to it here.