Research shows: olive oil could help prevent Alzheimer’s
I recently wrote about the bizarre price difference between olive oils in the supermarket, but I didn’t mention the health benefits of olive oil at all. It is packed with antioxidants and saturated fats and could even help prevent Alzheimer’s.
I already knew that olive oil is good for your heart (as was shown in research into Mediterranean diets, in which olive oil is used in many dishes). But that it can help prevent Alzheimer’s is new to me. Recent research has demonstrated this.
Olive oil instead of mayonnaise
It had already been shown that olive oil could prevent dementia in animals — but there was still no evidence for this in humans. That changed last year, when this research was presented at Nutrition 2023 in Boston. “Our study reinforces dietary guidelines that recommend plant oils such as olive oil and suggests that these recommendations support not only heart health, but potentially brain health as well. Choosing olive oil, a natural product, instead of fats such as margarine and commercial mayonnaise is a safe choice and may reduce the risk of fatal dementia,” Anne-Julie Tessler (who works at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) told the audience in Boston.
Choosing olive oil instead of mayonnaise is an obvious choice, but that this can genuinely help prevent dementia is a health benefit I hadn’t seen coming. Incidentally, this study was conducted only among men, but the figures don’t lie: all participants (and there were 32,000 of them) were over 56 and were followed for 28 years for this study.
A tablespoon of olive oil a day…
That group ate half a tablespoon of olive oil every day — there were no other dietary requirements. But that half tablespoon alone already meant that these men were 28 percent less likely to die from dementia (compared with people who ate hardly any olive oil).
And when that group also replaced their mayonnaise and/or margarine with the same amount of olive oil, the risk of dementia decreased by another 8 to 14 percent. The people who developed dementia often carried the APOE e4 gene (if you have this gene, you are at the greatest risk of developing dementia), but even then, consuming olive oil daily helped — having this gene does not guarantee that you will develop the disease.
Still, the researchers are cautious: “It is important to note that this is not causal, but merely an association. More research is still needed.” Until then, that half tablespoon a day certainly can’t hurt — I’m going to start right away.
Also read:
- Prison sentence for Greeks who wanted to sell sunflower oil as olive oil
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- Useful to learn: how to chop garlic step by step
Source: CNN
