Olive oil is not a health trend. It is the oldest cooking fat still in daily use. People across the Mediterranean have been pressing olives for oil since at least 4000 BC — long before anyone counted calories or measured cholesterol.
The ancient Greeks called it liquid gold. Roman soldiers received it as part of their rations. Hippocrates prescribed it. For thousands of years, the people who lived longest and stayed healthiest built their diets around it.
Modern science has spent decades trying to understand why. The answer comes back to one thing: extra virgin olive oil is not just a fat. It is a food.
What Makes Extra Virgin Different
Not all olive oil is the same. Refined olive oil — the cheap stuff in clear plastic bottles — has been processed with heat and chemicals. The refining strips out almost everything that makes olive oil good for you.
Extra virgin is the juice of the olive, extracted by mechanical pressing alone. No heat, no solvents, no refinement. It keeps its polyphenols, its antioxidants, its vitamins, and its flavour. The peppery bite you feel at the back of your throat when you taste good extra virgin? That is oleocanthal — a natural anti-inflammatory compound that works in a similar way to ibuprofen.
What the Research Shows
The evidence behind extra virgin olive oil is not marginal. It is one of the most studied foods in nutritional science.
The Mediterranean diet — where olive oil is the primary fat — is consistently associated with lower rates of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. A landmark Spanish trial found that people who consumed extra virgin olive oil daily had a 30 percent lower risk of major cardiovascular events compared to those on a low-fat diet.
The polyphenols in extra virgin olive oil have been shown to reduce inflammation, protect against oxidative stress, and support healthy cholesterol levels. The European Food Safety Authority has formally recognised that olive oil polyphenols contribute to the protection of blood lipids from oxidative damage.
Why Quality Matters
These benefits belong to extra virgin olive oil specifically — not to refined olive oil, not to pomace oil, not to blended oils labelled as “olive oil” without the extra virgin designation.
The grading matters. The freshness matters. How it was stored matters. Oil that has been sitting under fluorescent supermarket lights in a clear bottle for months has lost much of what made it valuable.
Good extra virgin olive oil should taste like something. It should be green, peppery, slightly bitter. If it tastes like nothing, it is doing nothing.
An Ancient Food for a Modern Kitchen
Six thousand years of human history point in the same direction as the clinical trials. Extra virgin olive oil is not a supplement or a superfood. It is simply good food — the kind that people have thrived on for longer than recorded history.
Use it generously. Cook with it, dress with it, finish with it. Your grandparents’ grandparents already knew what the scientists are now confirming.
Murataj & Son extra virgin olive oil is first cold pressed from Albanian olives and available from hydo.co.uk.
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