Olives & health

Health round-up Continuing our regular round-up of the latest relevant health research from around the world, to keep you up to date and in the know…

EVOO polyphenol may protect against food toxins

Eating polyphenol rich EVOO may naturally increase food safety, protecting from the harmful effects of some common food fungal toxins. That’s the finding of new research by scientists from the University of Louisiana - Monroe, published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Microbial growth during food storage can produce fungal mycotoxins, some of which negatively affect the nervous systems of both humans and livestock. Some are toxic to the human nervous system in very small doses and an accumulation of mycotoxins over time can result in serious health hazards: one of the most common is Penitrem A (PA), which is known to cause motor system dysfunctions including tremors and seizures.

The researchers looked at a number of minor bioactive phenolics in EVOO, including (+)-Pinoresinol (PN) and (+)-1-acetoxypinoresinol (AC, lignans with diverse biological activities. AC exclusively occurs in EVOO, while PN occurs in several plants, and preliminary in vitro

French researchers have found that eating a Mediterranean style diet (including olive oil, of course) can reduce the risk of female smokers developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Women are more likely to develop RA and the relationship between smoking and an increased risk of RA is well known, as is the efficacy of olive oil in reducing the inflammatory activity of the disease.

The researchers therefore conducted a study to assess the relationship between adherence to the Mediterranean diet and the risk of RA, especially in high risk individuals (particularly smokers).

They utilized the French E3N EPIC prospective cohort study, which has included 98,995 women since 1990. The study includes dietary data collected via a validated food frequency questionnaire, with adherence to the Mediterranean diet assessed as consumption of a number of key foods, including olive oil, and scored accordingly.

The results, published recently in the Journal of the American

Scientists at Temple’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine have discovered that consuming high polyphenol EVOO in early adulthood can protect against developing frontotemporal dementia.

Typically manifesting between 40-65, frontotemporal dementia can lead to behavior and personality changes, difficulty speaking and writing, and eventual memory deterioration. It is one of a group of aging-related diseases called tauopathies, which are characterized by the gradual buildup in the brain of an abnormal form of a protein called tau.

For the study, published recently in the journal Aging Cell, The researchers fed extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) to a group of lab mice engineered to develop tau-related dementia, at an age comparable to 30 or 40 years in humans. screening identified both as having the potential ability to reverse PA toxicity.

Subsequently testing in a mouse model, AC significantly minimized the effects of fatal PA doses and normalized most biochemical factors.

They concluded that the olive lignan AC can prevent the neurotoxicity of food-contaminating mycotoxins, and that consumption of lignan-rich olive oil “can protect the sciatic and peripheral nervous system against the insult caused by … fungal toxins”.

They therefore believe that olive oil could be used as a food additive to increase food safety.

Med Diet can reduce risk of rheumatoid arthritis in smokers

Sources: www.pubs.acs.org; www.oliveoiltimes.com. College of Rheumatology, identified 480 incident cases of RA among 62,629 relevant participant women.

They found that within the total study population, the Med diet adherence score was not associated with a change in RA risk. Among smokers, however, a higher Med diet score (better adherence) was associated with a decreased risk of RA – 38.3 per 100,000 person years, compared with 51.5 per 100,000 person years for those with low scores.

For women who had never smoked and had high Mediterranean diet scores, the risk was even lower, at 35.8 per 100,000 person years.

While noting that further research is needed, they concluded that their results “suggest that adherence to the Mediterranean diet could reduce the high risk of RA among ever smoking women”.

High polyphenol EVOO keeps frontotemporal dementia at bay

Source: www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Six months later, when the mice were the equivalent of age 60 in humans, they found that the mice who were fed the EVOOsupplemented diet had a 60% reduction in tau deposits in the brain compared to those who were not given EVOO. The same mice also showed improved performance on memory and learning tests.

Concluding that “Extra virgin olive oil improves synaptic activity, short-term plasticity, memory and neuropathology in a tauopathy model,” the researchers now plan to explore whether EVOO can reverse tau damage and ultimately treat tauopathy in older mice – and therefore also, we hope, in humans.

Source: www.templehealth.org.