Olive Oil Health Benefits You Should Know

 I want to talk to you about why olive oil is such an important part of our protocol, and it's kind of deceivingly simple. People think it's a little strange and, but quite honestly, olive oil is one of the major protective components that gives the strength to the Mediterranean diet, alright.  That olive oil and the fish oil, but fish oil I will talk about it in another blog. So,olive oil, so let's, here's the background: one, when we were Stone Age humans we would eat plants and animals, things like that, and we had this balance of what are called omega fatty acids. So you have Omega-6 fatty acids that turn oninflammation, you have Omega-3 fatty acids that turn OFF inflammation, alright, and we need some of each of these, roughly 1:1 ratio some wherearound there. And so, if you sprained your ankle as a caveman, so to speak, you needed the Omega-6's to turn on inflammation, and then once the damage is repaired you have these Omega-3's that help shut off the reparative process. So that's kind of what they do in the background in your body. So you need this 1:1 ratio. 

But unfortunately, starting around in the 1950's we, in the U.S. and then followed by pretty much every other country around the worldover the following few decades, we "industrialized" our foodsupply, and we started putting vegetable oils in the food supply - such as soy, and safflower, and sunflower, and margarine, and shortening, and stuff like that. These things contain a lot of Omega-6's, and the Omega-6 in particular, that'sparticularly toxic, is linoleic acid. And Americans are now getting somewhere like 20 times the amount that they should have of Omega-6's versus 3's alright. Remember we're supposed to be about 1:1. 

So we got 20 times the amount of this inflammatory stuff, and it's almost like you're body's saturated with kerosene, gasoline. And you get a little injury, you need a little inflammation to fight that process,   and help repair that process - you get a LOT! You get so much it's hard to shut off, alright. And so, that's kind of part of the problem and it's fuelling a lot of the systemic chemical   inflammation that's now being referred to as "Inflamma-Ageing", and we will get you other blog posts on that as well. So, what do we do about this?  Well one is, you try to get rid of this excess stuff in your food supply. So you, now canola - people fight me about this and I don't want to get into the GMO discussion - but canola is a pretty even 1:1 ratio so, I don't mind canola, alright. And for the, in terms ofthe Omega issues, if you're worried about GMO and things like that, you can getorganic, non-GMO, canola's and then you don't have to worry about that.  But, socanola has this 1:1 balance. Now, and you can like say, certain food products thatare made with soy, now some of the manufacturers, like mayonnaise, they make,some of them are making it with canola, so you can do some switches like that.

If you happen to use vegetable oils at home you get rid of that, you can use anolive oil or canola to replace that, and so forth.  So there's some stuff you can do there, but it is ever-present. It is every time you eat out, it's in somany packaged goods it's really, really hard just to get rid of the whole thingand balance that out on your own. So, what you need is, remember the Omega-6 (called linoleic acid), what you need is a linoleic acid blocker, so to speak, and that's what's in olive oil! It's a Omega-9 called oleic acid.  Extra-virgin olive oilis roughly 60-70% oleic acid, alright. Now don't be fooled by some vegetable oils, they'll say "high oleic sunflower oil" it only has about 10% oleic acid, it'snot very high ok, it's not going to protect you like olive oil.

  So olive oil is very unique in this way. And, and so what happens is you get way too much of these Omega-6's in your cell membranes, you have a few, you have a few Omega-3s, you got way too many 6's, and what we're finding is - theoleic acid comes in, and pushes out these excess Omega-6's, and they get burned off, as fuel or something, and now it helps stabilize that kind of,1:1 balance. You may start out at a 20:1, you maybe go to 15:1 by cleaning up your food, and then the olive oil gets you down close to that 1:1 ratio. That's the magic of olive oil okay. So here's the kind of studies we have you - you take a sweet little mouse, poor little guy, and we're gonna feed him in this 20:1 ratio, alright. You feed him for six weeks.

 Now it's not like huge amounts, its amounts that are normal for a mouse, but in that kind of balance, and in six weeks they get brain damage (from the inflammation), they become obese, and they're pre-diabetic alright.Now, the experts in this field are starting to worry that this is probablythe trigger, the major trigger at least, for global obesity and diabetes, because once you industrialize your food base in these countries, about 20 years later -diabetes and obesity starts in the, in the country okay. So now we take this fat,little, pre-diabetic mouse, poor guy, and we leave him on the bad food, but you now add the olive oil alright, in two more months - brain repair, brain is fixed, the obesity and the diabetes goes away - HUGE impact okay.

It totally blocks and protects the brain, and allows the brain to recover from that stress. We're now finding it also helps protect you, not only from vegetable oils, but there's asaturated fat that's often put into packaged foods and things, called palmitic acid, it helps block that too, alright. So, I take my olive oil, and I should also add, we've known very powerful things about olive oil fordecades, okay. From epidemiological studies about how healthy different populations are, it's just that right now we're starting to understand the preciselittle details of what to do.

 We've known about two tablespoons a day is very healthy for people, for 10-15 years, alright. So, what are my recommendations? Two tablespoons of olive oil a day, preferably with your Nemechek Autonomic Medicine custom shot glass, which is only available to patients (a little teaserthere for everybody), and you got to make sure you got decent olive oil. Now the Mediterranean makes wonderful olive oil, okay. But, because nobody's monitoring the quality of it as its being imported, the reports are upwards of 75% of the stuff is fraud. It's either really low-grade stuff, that'sactually inflammatory, it's not, or it's not even olive oil at all - it might besoy oil and they put some chlorophyll in there to make it kind of green - andthere's even some case reports people were shipping machine oil,and labelling it as extra-virgin olive oil, so you gotta be very careful.

Well, which one do you pick? If it's 75%, and you got four bottles on the shelf fromyou know, the Mediterranean, only one of them, statistically, is gonna have thereal deal. So what do you do? Unfortunately, what I say is: you gotta buy it from California, alright, because in California there's a big group called the California Olive Oil Council (COOC). It's a trade group, it's not really astate regulation. It's a voluntary group that the growers can grow, growers can join, and when they join they agree to send their oil out for testing, okay, and so, and there's, you'll see the COOC little circular label on the back.

I recommend only use California olive oil, you know with the COOC label. There aresome brands that say California, if you look it is actually is distributed fromCalifornia, but it comes from like, some other place around the world, alright.And one of the brands that we use a lot of, is California Olive Ranch okay.I don't have any affiliation with these people. They're big. They make,they have tons of olive oil. It's easy to find anywhere in the United States. It'srelatively inexpensive, that's the reason why I tend to recommend them, it's just easy for people to find no matter where they live. So olive oil - very good for you!It helps, think of it like a shield over your body from these kind of, inflammatory by-products that have been put in the food supply, aswe've had this industrialized, industrialization of food -VERY powerful for brain recovery in my patients.

 And what we see quite frequently, is patients will come back for a long-term follow-up, maybe they're still doing these different aspects of their treatment protocol, but the one thing they'll skip, or they've started not doing, is their olive oil - we'll see their brainsrelapse. We see the brain injury return okay. It's a really, really powerful, easything to do. So, a lot of people will just chug it down, that's what I do every day.You don't have to do that, you can put it on your salad; you can put it in a smoothie. Cooking with it will not harm the oleic acid in the olive oil -that's fine.  Cooking does not make it cancerous, or something like that.  I mean if you think about it, it was the major cooking oil in the Mediterranean for a thousand years, I think if it was causing disease when they cooked with it, they would have figured that out a long time ago, and there are no studies that really support that.