The EdibleRx: Why Does Olive Oil Get All the Love?

In an earlier column, I noted that while chocolate was loaded with fat and saturated fat, it didn't seem to raise cholesterol. All good.

This week, I want to emphasize that there is still something -- indeed, a lot -- to be said for telling patients to get more unsaturated fat into their diets.

If we think of fat as saturated, unsaturated, or polyunsaturated, it's saturated fat that's been getting a lot of ink lately. It's in everything, from coconut oil to real butter and bacon.

Then there's the talk about olive oil -- particularly about how it benefits health (watch this space for a later column about the details on that). Most of the fat in olive oil is monounsaturated, as it is with canola oil, but foodies tend to like olive oil for the flavor, at least for salads and cooking.

Polyunsaturated oils, mainly found in plant oils but especially high in sunflower, corn, and soybean oils, have all but gone off the populist radar. Chefs seldom speak of wild salmon drizzled with soybean oil or a salad with corn oil vinaigrette. Somehow, these don't quite make the mouth water in the same way. Okay, fair game.

But these liquid oils are loaded with polyunsaturated fatty acids, or PUFAs, and specifically loaded with a PUFA called linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid that may deserve our renewed attention.

In a recent meta-analysis that focused on swapping out saturated fat for polyunsaturated fat -- linoleic acid in particular -- there was a strong and positive association with a combination of less saturated fat and more PUFA fat, as linoleic acid. The more linoleic acid consumed, the greater reduction in heart-related death and heart-disease events.

Of course, this was only an association, which does not prove cause and effect. It did, however, involve more than a dozen studies and more than 300,000 people, and suggested that, at least for heart disease, less saturated fat is generally beneficial.

Here's what I say to my patients: when it comes to fat, go unsaturated and polyunsaturated whenever you have the choice. Cook and fry with liquid, plant-based oils. In general, liquid fats trump solid fats.

That said, there are foods in which you can't get a liquid fat. Yes, chocolate comes to mind, so it's important to carefully choose where to spend those saturated fat calories (I'll continue with my daily ounce of dark chocolate, thanks.) But swapping out butter when a liquid oil will do the job just as well. They're blander oils, so if you want extra flavor, sesame oil is actually a nice change-up and has lots of PUFA.

Another nice add-on for anyone working with patients and families who do have a tight budget is that many of the best liquid oils that are highest in PUFAs are economical. It's nice when I can tell my patients that their corn oil is not only okay but might actually be heart healthy. I don't want people thinking they need to buy estate-bottled exotic oils for $20 per pint in order to do something nice for their hearts. (I just received a mail offer for a nice bottle of olive oil that was $29 per half liter -- no thanks).

Of course, even heart-healthy oils have as many calories as solid fats, so advice to keep quantities modest still holds. I wouldn't want anyone thinking their obesity is okay just because they gained weight with heart-healthy oils.

Keith Ayoob, EdD, RD, is an associate professor of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

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