Photo: Zoltan Tasi
Olive Oil & Living Longer An Unexpected Find, With A Twist:
A doctor friend once said, “When you finish medical school, they tell you that half of what you just learned is wrong.”
“The only problem is, we don’t know which half.”
And so a lot of what we think we know about many things is really just based on general observations and anecdotes.
Like the success of The Mediterranean Diet.
We know it’s one of the best plans out there, but for the “Why?”, we only have educated-guesses.
Until now. Because a UMinn team looked into some of the more interesting benefits and found they come from really odd places…
General Benefits Of The Mediterranean Diet:
So The Mediterranean Diet has a few benefits.
The Longevity of people on it seems to be better.
As does their cardio health, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, inflammation, risk for diabetes,
And a few other things that even include larger brain volume with age, and better brain function.
But The Short Answer for the current study is that researchers only just found out that Olive Oil is probably the most important ingredient in it,
And especially when your body first stores it and later uses it during Exercise or Between meals,
With some surprising impacts on your overall health and maybe your lifespan.
Read on to find out the Details…
The List Of Mediterranean Dos & Don’ts:
The main components of the Mediterranean Diet are as follows:
I) Good/Encourages:
1) Whole Grains
2) Fruits
3) Vegetables
4) Mono-Unsaturated Fats (like Olive Oil)
5) Poultry
6) Fish & Seafood
7) Nuts, Beans, & Legumes
8) Moderate Red Wine
9) Herbs & Spices
II) Bad/Discourages:
1) Red Meat
2) Butter
3) Salt
4) Full-Fat Dairy
Sometimes, The Best We Have Is Correlation & Guesswork:
And just like all the previous “Correlation, Not Causation” work in SCIENCE,
We knew that people on the plan had better outcomes,
Just the same way researchers went out and basically said, “We have no idea how to live to 100, but the world is a giant experiment, let’s go find people with the results and try to deduce the methods from them!”
So their guesses for The Med were something like:
1) Reduced Cardiovascular Problems From Lower Saturated Fat
2) Lower Inflammation From Reduced Omega 6 Oils
3) Lower Inflammation and Better Cholesterol & Blood-Flow From Increased Omega 3 Oils
4) Increased Nutrients Through Lack Of Processing
5) Better Blood-Pressure From Lower Salt
6) Decreased Aging From Resveratrol In Red Wine
But these were still guesses, just like the ones about people living longer in Okinawa or Sardinia.
Until the recent series of targeted-studies by UMinn was carried out not on Red Wine but of all things, Olive Oil.
Eight Years Of Studies To Find The Hidden Mechanism:
In that work over the course of 8 years, Dr. Mashek’s team studied very detailed parts of the Mediterranean Diet.
And what they found was specific biochemical pathways that are activated in strange ways.
Stranger-still is that the main ingredient traveling through them comes not from Red Wine,
But from Olive Oil!
The way it works is that a person on that diet gets the oil in their food somehow,
Then their body absorbs & stores it, which still isn’t doing much of anything.
But then the magic happens!
Olive Oil & Living Longer. The Multi-Step Dance Starts With Just 2 Keys:
At some point later, that same person will either be doing cardiovascular exercise,
Or between meals in some way.
Strangely-enough, that part is very similar to what the magic of a few obscure eating-plans do, too!
Anyway, it’s in either of those 2 states that the body then releases the specific chemicals from stored olive oil fat back into your system.
It then creates a whole cascade of positive biochemical reactions that do at-least the following:
All The Good Things Olive Oil Does In The Secret Pathway:
1) Reduces Inflammation
2) Improves Metabolism
3) Increases Usage of Blood-Sugar in Metabolism
4) Accelerates Zombie-Cell Cleanup
5) Protects Against Cyclical DNA Damage
5a) Extends Life By Up-To 30% Because of That
6) Increases Available Life-Extension Compound NAD+
And the specific eating-plans that share these same benefits?
They’re the other big ones associated with life-extension before the Mashek team’s report.
We’ve Discussed Plans That Activate Similar Pathways Before:
Calorie-Restriction and Intermittent Fasting, baby!
(they even activate the same enzymes: SIRT-1 & CREB-1)
Still more interesting than just the work on Eating-Plans like CR & IF, is the twin-ideal to the thought that you cannot out-exercise bad nutrition:
Diet & calories are key for weight-loss, and Exercise is key for health!
Well, unless you’re on one of the two previously-mentioned eating-plans, you might not get these Top Secret benefits of Olive Oil if you Don’t exercise!
How about that!
The News Comes At A Great Time For The Western Diet:
All of this work really comes at an opportune-time.
The general western-diet is not particularly-healthy, even in the experiments on mice for Intermittent-Fasting.
38% of Americans are classified as obese.
And we seem to be getting entirely too much of every ingredient the Mediterranean Diet would recommend against,
Through our overconsumption of ultra-processed food and salty-snacks.
Until We Have The Details, Finding What Works Is Like Superstition:
So up until now, all we really had was something like anecdotes & superstition.
We knew cardio was healthy. We knew Intermittent-Fasting was magic.
We knew people on The Mediterranean Diet dodged all kinds of health-landmines and people in Sardinia live past 100.
We even suspected Intermittent-Fasting was doing other things with your metabolic-pathways when they were no longer digesting food.
There were some studies sure, but the specific reasons why anything recognized as healthy actually worked,
Were still locked in the very tiny mysteries of arcane-biochemistry.
But Detailed Biochemistry Research Will Eventually Unlock All Secrets:
-Until Dr. Mashek’s team spent 8 years chasing them down.
This is an unbelievably-exciting time to be alive.
Because especially with discoveries on compounds like NAD+, who knows what researchers will find next?
And for different people with tough-to-solve problems, all the way up to nutrition-warriors who just want to maximize everything they can,
Including quality and duration of lifespan, studies on the magic of Olive Oil and The Mediterranean Diet are just the tip of the iceberg!
References & Links:
• Source: UMinn.
• Source Study: MolecularCell – Lipid Droplet-Derived Monounsaturated Fatty Acids Traffic via PLIN5 to Allosterically Activate SIRT1
Leave a Reply