All that glitters on the plate is not gold. The case of olive oil.

The Mediterranean diet is now well known worldwide and recognized as a nutrition reference model by the World Health Organization. Virgin olive oil, prepared from healthy and intact fruits of the olive tree only by mechanical means, is a basic ingredient, a real pillar of this diet. Its positive role in health has now been a topic of universal concern. The virtues of natural olive oil, and especially of extra virgin olive oil, are related to the quality of the fruits, the employment of advanced technologies, and the availability of sophisticated analytical techniques that are used to control the origin of the fruits and guarantee the grade of the final product. Read more about olive oil in this post written by Maria Lisa Clodoveo and Dimitrios Boskou.

Virgin olive oil enriched with its own phenolic compounds promotes the main cardioprotective function of high-density lipoproteins (HDL)

The intake of olive oil enriched with phenolic compounds promotes ex vivo HDL-mediated macrophage cholesterol efflux in humans. Data provide direct evidence of the crucial role of olive oil PCs in the induction of macrophage-specific reverse cholesterol transport in vivo. The enrichment of olive oil with the phenolic compounds could be a way of increasing the beneficial properties of olive oil without raising its caloric content, constituting a nutraceutical strategy to enhance HDL cardioprotective properties.

Now Science & Wine also publish scientific posts about Mediterranean Diet

From now on you can read posts about Mediterranean Diet in Science & Wine blog. Initially posts will be published every two weeks at Wednesday. Read the first written by Dr. Ali Chaari and is about a study carried out to evaluate the possibility of pharmacological use of extra virgin olive oil polyphenols for type 2 diabetes mellitus prevention and therapy and for many other amyloid related diseases.