Is Olive Oil Good For You? | The Skinny on Oil episode artwork

EPISODE · Sep 16, 2026 · 14 MIN

Is Olive Oil Good For You? | The Skinny on Oil

from Nutrition Made Simple! · host Nutrition Made Simple!

Is Olive Oil good for you? Does it harm artery function, i.e. is olive oil bad for you? An objective look at the evidence on health effects of olive oil. Good or bad? Healthy or harmful? Let's find out.Subscribe for more free nutrition and health tips: https://bit.ly/2toMJ9uConnect with me:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrGilCarvalho/Twitter: https://twitter.com/NutritionMadeS3Animations: Even Topland @toplandmediaIs olive oil good for you? Olive oil has a heart-healthy reputation, but studies suggest a negative effect on our arteries after eating olive oil. So is olive oil is bad for you? Tricky to label things good or bad based on individual tests.Olive oil can lower inflammatory molecules.We decide if something is good for us or bad for us from all the evidence. Olive oil improves FMD long-term: "FMD was increased in individuals subjected to olive oil”Olive oil and heart disease? People who eat more olive oil have lower risk. Is olive oil good for you then? Maybe people who eat more olive oil also eat more salad and that makes them healthier not the oil per se.What we need is to split people randomly and ask half to eat more olive oil. PREDIMED looked at Mediterranean diets supplemented with nuts or olive oil. Other studies indicate that olive oil can improve glucose levels and prevent oxidative stress.We can be skeptical that olive oil is good for us. But hard to make a case that olive oil causes heart disease or olive oil is bad for us. I’m not pro or against olive oil. Olive oil is high in calories, right? Olive oil is not fattening per se. Some people eat a lot of olive oil and lose weight. Olive oil adds calories, but that doesn’t mean the oil is bad for you. Eliminating oils can cut calories for some, others can maintain a healthy weight while eating oil.But isn’t olive oil really high in saturated fat? Doesn’t that mean olive oil is bad for us? If we’re excluding olive oil because of saturated fat we have to exclude some nuts too.This idea of olive oil is bad for you goes back to shrinking of plaque on low-fat diets. If u have established heart disease and you want to play safe, no olive oil, ok.But does that mean we have to tell the whole world that olive oil is poison? In this paper the authors put olive oil in the beneficial group. They suggest olive oil is good for you. The evidence does not say olive oil is bad for us, period. It depends on a lot of factors What about Blood lipids? In some trials adding olive oil had no effect, others show nuts lowering cholesterol and triglycerides more than olive oil. If you have olive oil and great blood lipids, ok. But if you have cholesterol issues, olive oil is something you may want to try playing withSmoke point: oil starts to burn. Heating olive oil increases AGEs. Cooking olive oil 5mins increased AGEs. One option: add olive oil after cooking.If you have olive oil, go with Extra virgin. More benefits with polyphenol-rich oil as opposed to the refined versions like light olive oil.For most people, more olive oil would be an upgrade… Vicious nutrition wars over olive oil. Nobody needs olive oil. Is olive oil good for you or bad for you? It's less about the oil and more about the you.References:Olive oil and FMD https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109700008962https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/7/9/5356/htmexercise / sleep and FMD:https://bit.ly/30lHFnJhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/07420528.2012.654554other effects of olive oil:https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn20118https://www.nature.com/articles/nutd201523https://bit.ly/2AS7wJChttps://bit.ly/3dJWBjtsex and blood pressure:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/949020/FMD and CV risk: https://bit.ly/3f2NuLeolive oil and heart disease/mortality:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4198773/https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/96/1/142/4571420htt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Is Olive Oil Good For You? | The Skinny on Oil

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