What's in Your Olive Oil?

The Oil
I know what you're thinking. Oh my gobs, do they produce olive oil in Illinios too? No, if you remember from previous posts, Americans eat very little of what Illinois farmers grow. Most of it goes to Chinese pigs. Also, this isn't the right climate for olives. They do sell olive oil in Illinois. In fact, I found some at our local Schnucks.

Before the Greeks invented Democracy, Art, Philosophy, Science, Written Vowels, or Gyros, they invented Olive Oil and the civilized parts of the world have been cooking with it ever since. Archaeologists have found Minoan amphorae almost 6 thousand years old. An amphora was a pointy sort of clay pot used for storing and transporting olive oil.

Janusz Recław

The Minoan period denotes a bronze age civilization named for Minos. That's right. Labyrinth, Minotaur, Icarus and Daedalus, Theseus and Ariadne. That Minos.

George Frederic Watts

The olive oil we eat today comes in two basic varieties: virgin and refined. Virgin olive oil is extracted directly from the olive in a "cold press" process. Heat causes the oil to lose its flavor. Refined olive oil has been filtered with charcoal and other chemicals to remove acidity.

The official designations look like this:

• Extra Virgin - derived from virgin oil, 0.8% acidity
• Virgin - derived from virgin oil, 1.5% acidity
• Pure Olive Oil/Olive Oil - blend of refined and virgin oil, 2% acidity
• Refined - filtered oil, .3% acidity

Olive oil has become popular lately due to research that indicates olive oil can lower your LDL cholesterol. Olive oil itself has no cholesterol because cholesterol is only synthesized in animals. True story: you need to intake 0 mg of cholesterol a day. That's right. You have no dietary need for cholesterol, your body creates all the cholesterol it needs. Anything you eat is extra.

The magic ingredient of olive oil, the one responsible for its cholesterol zapping powers, the one that gives it the acidity measured above, is oleic acid. Oleic acid is monounsaturated fatty acid. Calm down. I'll explain.

A fatty acid is small acid molecule with a long string of carbons attached. Each carbon can carry up to two hydrogen atoms. If all the carbons have both of their hydrogens, the fat is saturated. Because it is saturated, it lies flat and you can pack it closely together into a solid. Like butter. If you're missing a few hydrogens, the fat is unsaturated. The missing carbons cause a kink in the chain, so the fats squiggle around like a liquid. Like oil, to be exact.

Sometimes food companies will hydrogenate oil, that is, bombard it with hydrogen to saturate it. When they do this, sometimes you get trans-fats, which are kinky like an oil, but pack tight like a solid. Also, it kills you. Check your ingredient labels. Hydrogenated = bad.

Anyway, back to oleic acid. Here's what it looks like:

Public Domain

The Ugly Truth
The other day, someone posted an article on Facebook about how some brands of honey aren't real honey. Someone posted a comment saying that sometimes olive oil isn't real olive oil. Concerned, I googled it and read several articles referencing a study done at UC Davis. They ran tests on several common brands of olive oil and determined that most of the olive oils on the grocery store shelves weren't real olive oil. They were adulterated with other kinds of oil like safflower and sunflower and sometimes canola.

I was horrified. The brand sitting in my kitchen was on the list: Pompeiian.

There's a simple test you do at home to determine if you have real olive oil or not. Oleic acid solidies at 39 °F, so if you put it in the fridge, it should turn cloudy and thick as it cools. The internet people call it the Fridge Test.

The Experiment
I poured 3 oz of Pompeiian Extra Virgin Olive Oil into a shot glass. I took the temperature and noted the clarity and solidity of the room temperature oil straight from the bottle. Then, I recorded those three physical attributes every 10 minutes until the oil fell beneath the 39 °F threshold. I checked it one last time an hour after I put it in the fridge. Here are my results:

1:05 PM
Temperature: 68 °F
Clarity: 100%
Solidity: 0%

1:15 PM
Temperature: 52 °F
Clarity: 100%
Solidity: 0%

1:25 PM
Temperature: 46 °F
Clarity: 100%
Solidity: 0%

1:35 PM
Temperature: 37 °F
Clarity: 100%
Solidity: 0%

2:05 PM
Temperature: 35 °F
Clarity: 100%
Solidity: 0%

Conclusion: Even after sitting beneath the 39 °F threshold for over 30 minutes, Pompeiian Extra Virgin Olive Oil never grew cloudy or viscous. Which means I had adulterated olive oil. I spent several minutes sobbing on the kitchen floor. Then I actually read the report.

Turns out, no one else had.

The Study
http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/news-events/news/files/olive%20oil%20final%20071410%20.pdf

Near the end of report, after all the pictures and fancy charts, in text, it says:
"If any of the samples were adulterated, it is most likely that the adulterant was refined olive oil rather than refined nut, seed, or vegetable oils. Unless the adulteration levels were very small, the failed samples would not have met the IOC/USDA standards for fatty acid profile and sterol profile if adulterated with refined nut, seed, or vegetable oils."

So, the testing revealed that the oils were blends of refined and virgin olive oils not blends of olive oil and non-olive oil. The lower oleic acid levels resulting from the addition of refined olive oil affect the solidification in The Fridge Test. The primary concern here is the flavor. I read that oil companies ship the pure stuff to countries like Greece and Italy, where they can tell the difference, and ship the adulterated versions to America since we're idiots and can't tell the difference.

I can't. Can you?

When it says Extra Virgin Olive Oil on the label is it a lie? Sort of. Is it as good for you as unadulterated oil? No. Is it bad for you? No. Should you dump your oil down the drain and order expensive, organic olive oil online? Of course not. Don't Panic.

The Parting Shot:
Olive oil smells like death.

The decaying corpses of some insects like bees and ants spontaneously emit oleic acid, the magic ingredient of olive oil. When a living ant gets a waft of oleic acid from a nearby corpse, it responds by hauling the dead ant to the ant graveyard. I heard a story on the radio the other day about the scientist who discovered this. After isolating the chemical culprit, he smeared living ants with oleic acid to see what would happen. Other ants would haul the oiled ants to the graveyard and toss them on to the pile of dead ants. Every time the oiled ants returned, they would be promptly hauled back and tossed on the pile. It took the ants over an hour to clean off enough of the oil to keep themselves out of the dead ant pile. And you thought you had a rough day. Ants leave no ant behind. If you leave out ant poison in your house to kill ants, you will often see more ants after the poison clears. They are returning to drag their dead back to the ant graveyard.