This February, America is celebrating its 58th consecutive year of American Heart Month, which was originally started in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Over the years, people have found many ways to celebrate the importance of caring for your heart health. For instance, some people choose to wear red on the first Friday of the month to highlight the fact that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women.
Many people also choose to focus on improving their risk factors for heart disease that they can control. Quitting smoking, adding more physical activity to your day and eating healthier foods are all resolutions that you might have made at the beginning of the New Year, and you can use this month to help you keep momentum for staying on track with accomplishing each one.
In your efforts to eat healthier, you might have noticed that replacing other fats with olive oil keeps coming up as a recommendation for improving heart health. Knowing how to pick the best type of olive oil for your heart helps you to plan delicious meals that double as health-boosters for your cardiovascular system.
What Is Extra Virgin Olive Oil?
If you’ve ever stared at a grocery store shelf filled with different bottles of olive oil, then you might’ve felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of types that are available. Typically, olive oil is narrowed down into these four main categories:
- Light and extra light olive oil
- Regular, which is sometimes called pure
- Virgin
- Extra virgin
The easiest way to understand what designates olive oil as falling within the extra virgin category is to look at how manufacturers produce the different types. Each type of oil starts with fresh olives that are ground down into a paste. Then, the paste is pressed twice to remove as much of the oil as possible naturally. After that, the remaining paste goes through additional heat or chemical processing to remove the rest of the oil.
Extra virgin olive oil comes from the first pressing, which typically provides it with the lowest level of Oleic Acid. Virgin oil can also come from the first pressing, but it won’t meet the standards that are in place for it to be graded as extra virgin. Regular olive oil is treated with heat or chemicals and has a higher Oleic Acid level. If you see a bottle labeled as light or extra light, this means that regular olive oil has also been mixed with other types of oil.
Why Extra Virgin Olive Oil is Best for Heart Health
The reason why extra virgin olive oil is the best olive oil for heart health than other types all comes down to its purity. Since it isn’t mixed with other oils, you don’t have to worry about adding unhealthy fats to your diet. The cold-pressing process also helps the oil to retain more antioxidants, monounsaturated fats and other nutrients than the other types.
In addition, extra virgin olive oil contains higher levels of a special class of antioxidants called polyphenols, which have been known to help increase the levels of good, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Using extra virgin olive oil further protects your heart by increasing the levels of substances that help to prevent bad, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol from oxidizing. Since the oxidation of bad cholesterol can increase your risk of developing blood clots, doing what you can to prevent this from happening can help you to avoid having a heart attack or stroke.
