OLIVES

Small bitter oval fruit, green when unripe and black when ripe, used for food and for oil.

Olive oil
Olive oil is a fruit-juice. Olive oil is cold pressed olive juice and olives are a fruit. That’s why it's so healthy and is used in the finest cuisines all over the world. Cold pressed means that the olives are picked and squeezed and are not boiled before squeezing.

Sorts
There are three types of olive oil:
• Extra vierge: the purest oil with an excellent taste and a low acidic level;
• Vierge: oil with a very good taste and a higher acidic level;
• Normal olive oil: this consists of a mix of refined olive oil and an oil between extra vierge and vierge olive oil, it has a good to normal taste.

Wine
You can compare olive oil with wine. Its quality and taste is influenced by geographical factors such as land or region. You also have good and bad olive years, depending on the weather during a certain season. The quality depends of the good care of growers and producers. There are oils with a strong and with a mild taste, some are spicy and others have a grass taste or taste a bit like nuts. No olive oil is the same.
There is yellow and green olive oil. The color says something about the time of season the olives are harvested and not about the quality.

The benefits of olives and olive-oil
*In the mediterranean countries of Europe people eat a lot of olive oil. It is common to eat bread or toast just dipped in olive oil. Because of the daily use of olive oil the people that live in these countries suffer less from heart diseases than people of other countries in Europe.
* The use of olive oil has a positive effect on the cholesterol level in our blood.
*Because olives grow in a warm environment and the fruit has to protect itself from heat and bright sunshine, olives contain a lot of fenol-like substances. These substances could possibly play a role in the prevention and cure of thrombosis and arteriosclerosis.
*It is often said that olive oil causes problems with the stomach or intestines. This is simply not the case. Olive oil is very easy to digest and mild for the intestines!

Test it yourself
You can do a little test. If you spill some olive oil on your hands you can easily wash it off. It disappears fast in the sink and you don't need a lot of hot water and detergent to wash it away. Because your body is like a glass of water it reacts the same.
If you have eaten some olive oil your body will evaporate it within 1½ hour via your pores. This means your body can handle it easily and does not have to waste any energy to digest it. This works differently with baking butter and other products, especially those based on animal products. In this case you have to scrub hard and need hot water and detergent to dissolve the fat in the water so it can be washed away.

Use more olive oil
Oil and butter based on vegetables are to be preferred but olive oil is best of course and you can fry everything in it. To put it shortly: everything you eat should be based on fruit or vegetables. You will look and feel much healthier and younger too!