I just found out yesterday after perusing my pal Primal Toad‘s blog that over two thirds of the common brands of extra virgin olive oils are adulterated – either with cheaper, rancid, lower quality olive oil, or actually cut with completely different oils like sunflower or soybean.
You don’t know how mad this makes me!!
Check out my video for my rants and also tips on how to tell if your extra virgin olive oil is telling lies about its virginity:
Links to help you learn more:
How to Tell if Your Olive Oil is the Real Thing
Olive Oil Scam REVEALED (And How to Spot the Real Stuff) – includes lists of potentially okay EVOO brands and not okay EVOO brands
Does this annoy you too? or are you not as anal about your oils as I am?
41 Responses
In a few years, we’ll have to buy Extra Double Very Virgin So Virgin it will blow your mind Olive Oil….. to get the real deal!! It’s frustrating!
Tell me about it :/
now you gotta look out for girls and olive oil lieing about thier virginity, grrreat… thanks for the video! i do have a question though not about olive oil. the past few months i’ve been really working on my diet but the past week i have been slipping a lot and have been eating some junk and i’d really like to start over fresh and i was thinking about doing a juice fast to really jump start my new diet. is this a good idea or does it even matter? how many days would be ideal to fast for? do you ever so juice fasts? thanks!
Hi Kerstin,
Yeah, I think a short fast isn’t a bad idea to kick off a healthy lifestyle. I’d probably recommend three days to start, especially if you’ve never fasted before.
I’ve done a few fasts in the past, but personally, and this was just my experience is that I never quite got the results I wanted from it – I even did a ten day juice fast once and my acne didn’t budge :/ It was an interesting experience though. If I was going to do a fast again, I’d probably do a mostly bone broth fast with some green juice added in there. I’d also cut down on the amount of sugary fruit I was using for my green juices
Ha!
I’ve always been wondering where they take all those olives from! The territory in Italy is amazing, but too limited to produce olives, tomatoes, lemons, oranges, durum wheat, cheese and wine for the whole world. There simply HAD to be some kind of a cheat – and I guess there are even more fake products out there!
At least now I know why they are going mad for those sunflower cultivations in some (mostly southern) areas of Italy lately. Sunflowers grow in no time and do not need any special care. Olive trees can live for several centuries and can remain productive for all that time, but have to be pruned correctly and regularly. Harvesting sunflower seeds is a simple mechanical process, olives require manual labor. And that’s a big cost!
However, fortunately I’m getting the oil from my boyfriend’s family. They have an awesome olive grove, so I know where my oil comes from and how they produce it!
Thanks for the insights Svea, I was wondering if you’d have something to say on the subject since you live in Italy. You’re lucky to know exactly where your olive oil comes from!
PS – everyone – someone on youtube suggested flax seed oil as a replacement for olive oil, which I completely forgot about. So even though they’re expensive, I think I may do that and switch my olive oil for salads over to one of those omega oils – flax, or hemp, or whatever else – extra omega benefits too
Marks daily apple has some solid posts on olive oil. I think trader joes unfiltered california estate is legit. 7 dollars a bottle. Also use macadamia oil or avocado oil. I rarely use these oils however. Pretty much just for occasional salads. Flax seed has a lot of estrogen in it. Flax and hemp were traditionally used for industry fiber etc not food. Ive replaced flax seed with chia seeds.
Have they got chia oil yet?
Hi Tracy. I don’t know if the “test” is valid but everytime the temperature goes low in our storage room the olive oil goes cloudy (but it’s usually temperature close to 0°C (32°F?))
Well, I don’t know, because mine started to get cloudy in the fridge after a couple of days, and I’ve noticed people around the internet saying that that happened to them too – it didn’t get hard right away, but it did after a few. I really don’t know if this test is bunk or not
Tracy you are awesome on this video!!! you look so credible with hese real emotions! great!
anyway, about the flaxseed oil – it is not a total replacement for olive oil as it is not a fruit oil and gets rancid really (and I mean reaaaally) quickly!
here is an interesting rticle about it:
http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=george&dbid=73
No I know… I know it goes rancid easily too, so really, how do I know if that is good either. Oils are just sketchy, I guess, you just don’t know!
Coconut oil for the win!!
I have always thought Mountain Rose Herbs was quality. They offer a few different oils, but they aren’t super expensive.. do you think they are good? Agh, how would we know anyway? :/
I guess the only way to know is to contact mountain rose herbs and see if they actually know specifically where the olives come from – like farm, and family etc. I really don’t know how to tell otherwise :/
Weird. I was just wondering yesterday HOW good my EVOO actually is. I’d been explaining to my roommate the difference between his “pure” olive oil & the extra-virgin designation, then I got to wondering…how do we really know for sure the quality?! Turns out, we don’t!
Yeah, oils are very sketchy because even if it was pure to begin with, how do we know it’s not gone off?? You just don’t know. And I always thought extra virgin when it came to olive oil was a regulated term, but I guess it’s not, or at least it’s not specified that the entire product has to be extra virgin olive oil, or if just a little bit of it does
Well, it’s a regulated term! It’s simply false labeling. Extra virgin olive oil HAS to be 100% extra virgin olive oil. But let’s be honest: Nobody would like to buy a bottle that is just labeled “olive oil” or only “virgin olive oil”. We all want the best for us! It’s sad, but that’s how “business” works today. Demand and supply. And it’s not only olive oil!
However, I just found some independent product test results from Switzerland and Germany (don’t ask me why I don’t believe in Italian tests!): strange enough, these tests were both won by private supermarket brands!
As far as the oils sold internationally are concerned, it seems that you can still buy:
Monini (Val Mazara DOP),
Monti Iblei (Val Tellaro DOP),
De Cecco (Colli Assisi Spoleto DOP).
Yes, not EVERY Italian oil is necessarily crap!
AVOID:
Carapelli,
Bertolli,
Huile d’Olive Puget.
The last two oils have not been tested, but my boyfriend who grew up with the taste of genuine and freshly pressed olive oil says these are crap, too!!! So AVOID:
Colavita,
Olio Dante.
Beyondhealth.com has the highest quality everything, especially olive oil. Check them out before throwing in the towel, it’s all about healing on the cellular level.
Oh great, that’s a really good suggestion for the Americans – that olive oil looks excellent: http://beyondhealth.com/oliveoil-bh.asp
Unfortunately they don’t ship to Canada or outside the US – I don’t really like importing stuff if I can help it too because of customs and shipping charges
That is the problem these days, so many companies try to trick is into buying things by twisting the truth or just plain lying.
It is no good to just look at labels these days, you have to research everything to make sure what is in it is what they are saying.
Love the video.
Thanks Tracy.
Bobby Thomas
I know. It just sucks because who has the energy to really deeply research every brand to make sure they aren’t lying… it’s tough. I’m just trying to move as far away packaged foods as possible, but, you know, it’s not easy to get every single foodstuff locally, and the oils thing is especially difficult because fats are so important to the body and it’s important that they are quality.
I am totally with you on the staying away from just all packaged foods. I’ve just learned you can’t really trust anything anymore, sadly…and it seems when I do buy something packaged, I do extensive research and it can literally take days to figure out all the pros and cons of each product, sooo tiring! I wish there was a “Paleo Market”.
This irks me so badly!
Tried the fridge test on my EVOO, nope, didn’t solidify at all! And I spent a good amount of money on it at Trader Joe’s. ARGH
I know, it bugs me a lot too. I’m still using mine at the moment just because I don’t know what else to use, and haven’t decided quite yet
It’s so weird you did this post because I’ve recently been thinking about how pure my EVOO really is..
I cook with coconut oil, butter, and animal fat and would normally just use evoo drizzled over already cooked food, but lately I’ve been eating more avocadoes.
This may be a really amateaur question but could grapeseed oil be an option to exchange for the evoo? Or would an almond oil be best?
I really actually love the taste of olive oil though! 🙁
Here’s a good article to figure out which oils are best: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/healthy-oils/#axzz1se1cPwKT
It sounds like grapeseed oil isn’t the best bet, I’ve heard it’s usually very processed. I think avocado oil might be the best alternative,… maybe unrefined sesame oil… but …. …… how can we trust that these oils are really what they say they are?? 0_o …..
I put some of my EVO in the fridge and looked at it the next day. It was still liquid! I then forgot about it for a couple of days. Just now, I noticed that it has solidified. Apparently it takes longer than just overnight.
What about eating olives? Is this better than the oil? If they were from a health food shop and really expensive!? And organic..
Yeah olives are definitely better since they haven’t had to go under any process of extraction and therefore their fat wouldn’t be rancid as its still contained in the olive. And you’d really know it was from an olive!
*By the way everyone – I looked avocado oil at the store, and it was so expensive and I just couldn’t do it! However, one brand of extra virgin olive oil in particular that I may try out before I ditch EVOO is Colavita. I can’t say for sure that it’s perfect, but it comes in a dark container, and it has a best before date and a date of when the lot of olives were processed (you don’t want to go for a really old olive oil that’s been sitting on the shelf for ages), AND it actually tells you the family and region and farm in which it came from, unlike a lot of other brands that are very vague.
Also – I also read an interesting article that brought to light that maybe it’s not so much that these companies are all using lesser olive oil grades to begin with, and that maybe they really WERE extra virgin to begin with, but it’s just the handling practices and exposure to light etc that has caused the olive oil to oxidize and no longer be considered extra virgin. That makes me feel a little better, but also.. not really, because it just makes eating oils in general seem very sketchy since you have no idea what’s gone off and what’s not
Hey, I put my olive oil in the fridge and it went hard over night. It is organic and fair trade though so I would have been surprised if it didn’t. I think you can only get it in england though. Also it wasn’t cheap. Luckily I work in an organic health food store and we sell fresh olives so I have access to them any time i want! Also what about foods that are smoked? Does this damage the oils? I love oak smoked olives
I’m not sure about smoked foods, apparently they can be problematic – I guess there are unhealthy ways to smoke food, and healthier ways – and I think a lot of smoked foods also have preservatives that tend to go with them (like nitrates). But if it helps – I’d totally eat smoked olives.
We all should move to Italy and grow our own olives and make our own real olive oil. I paid a bit extra money for Bertoli olive oil, thinking that maybe I could avoid the fraud, but a couple of months after I bought it, the oil showed its true colors–fake.
hey tracy i was wondering something, i want to cut all oil out of my diet and i was reading the ingredients in my gluten free bread and there’s canola oil in it..is that bad too?
Hi Trish – well, canola oil is really not a good oil (unfortunately it seems like it’s in everything!). It’s hard to say if such a small amount in your bread will be any bother or not, especially if you cut out most sources of oils – but if your goal is to cut out all oils, then yeah… canola should go
okay thanks tracy!! it is in evreythingggg i swear, which i find extremely frustrating lol
The Frig test is not a good indicator of good olive oil. Price alone is not much help, either. I have found a very good Greek EVOO imported from their own olive orchard from Shoreline Foods, a Greek store in Pensacola FL. Their Shoreline EVOO is a great buy in the 3 liter tin for 37 cents per oz.
Also, Costco is selling 2-3 liter tins of La Civetta EVOO, Product of Italy, for $64.99 or $68.24 for non-members, with free shipping. This very special Italian olive oil is made from Coratina & Frantoio olives, imparting a rich and fruity flavor. @ 33.6 cents per oz proves good oil does not have to break the bank. Also, I have read several reports that say olive oil can take the heat of cooking and does not break down. I just love my eggs cooked in EVOO every day. I even take the oil left in the pan and drip it over my sausage and bacon, yum.
And you are sure that Shoreline is not “fake”?
I have not seen it on any lists that would get me to believe it is fake. From the reviews on their web site and the 2 orders I have purchased it seems to be a good quality oil. Have you had different results. I live in MT, if I lived in CA I would go right to the source and purchase EVOO direct from the growers. But I do not have that option.
The fridge test is not perfect, but still better than nothing. If it doesn’t solidify it’s not olive oil. Trust your nose, tongue and stomach. Worm it up a bit in the pan and try the smell. Good olive oil delivers a nice fruity smell. Olive oil is very light to digest, if it feels heavy on your stomach, it’s also not olive oil.
In Europe it’s well known that most Italian oils are pressed from olives which are imported from Greece or Spain or cut with other oil. Still, there are some few good Italian oils available. Monini is my favored, It’s not very expensive and excellent in taste, Don’t expect to buy a top quality oil for less then 15$ per Litre, More than 25$ per Litre are rip-off.
Otherwise, Greek oils are highly recommended (especially the ones from Creete). Olive oils are for the Greek people sacred, no one dares to cut them with other oils.
Quality of extra vierge oils is determined by the accidity, the lower the better.
High quality oils from Greece can be recognized by the the amount of acid printed on the label. Maximum limit for an extra vierge oil is 1% acid. Oils with less than 0.5% acid are of high quality, while oils form Sitia (Creete) have less than 0.3% acid. The time span between collecting the olives and pressing them, the age of the oil (especially the exposure to oxygen or light), have major impact on the amount of acid.
It’s also perfect for cooking (just don’t overheat it), The Greek are only using olive oils in the kitchen and still don’t suffer from overweight and are the most healthy people in Europe (Creete has the oldest people and lowest heart attack rate)