Study Suggests Olive Oil Helps Prevent Arterial Disease, Pomace Oil Might Worsen

New evi­dence shows that daily con­sump­tion of extra vir­gin olive oil offers some­thing of a shield against periph­eral arte­r­ial dis­ease (PAD).

A newly pub­lished research on the sub­ject led by the Spanish University of Jaén also hints at the pos­si­bil­ity that olive pomace oil could pave the way to PAD.

The research was con­ducted by a cross-sec­tional analy­sis car­ried out in 4,330 par­tic­i­pants in a wide trial involv­ing vol­un­teer recruit­ment cen­ters and obe­sity sup­port groups through­out Spain and known as PREDIMED-Plus, con­sid­ered the largest Spanish trial on nutri­tion.

According to the study pub­lished by the mag­a­zine Atherosclerosis, the goal of the sci­en­tists has been to under­stand the asso­ci­a­tion between the ankle-brachial index (ABI), con­sid­ered a PDA marker, and olive oil and olive pomace oil con­sump­tion.

PREDIMED-Plus, a trial of lifestyle mod­i­fi­ca­tion in indi­vid­u­als with over­weight or obe­sity har­bor­ing the meta­bolic syn­drome, has the ambi­tion to doc­u­ment the health ben­e­fits of olive oil and the Mediterranean diet.

“Consumption of any cat­e­gory of olive oil and olive pomace oil was assessed through a val­i­dated food-fre­quency ques­tion­naire,” explained the authors of the research intro­duc­ing their results, and ​“mul­ti­vari­able lin­ear regres­sion mod­els were fit­ted to assess asso­ci­a­tions between olive oil con­sump­tion and ABI.”

“Among 4,330 par­tic­i­pants,” wrote the researchers, ​“the high­est quin­tile of total olive oil con­sump­tion (sum of all cat­e­gories of olive oil and olive pomace oil) was asso­ci­ated with higher mean val­ues of ABI”. Still, logis­tic mod­els com­par­ing the con­sump­tion of the dif­fer­ent olive oil types and olive pomace oil revealed an inverse asso­ci­a­tion between vir­gin olive oils con­sump­tion and the like­li­hood of a low ABI, while con­sump­tion of olive pomace oil was pos­i­tively asso­ci­ated with a low ABI.

“In this way,” the University note reads, ​“the researchers con­cluded that, in patients with high car­dio­vas­cu­lar risk, the con­sump­tion of olive oil is asso­ci­ated with ben­e­fits for the pre­ven­tion of periph­eral arte­r­ial dis­ease, the oppo­site of the con­sump­tion of pomace olive oil, which could pro­mote its devel­op­ment.”

Those find­ings con­firm the hypoth­e­sis of pre­vi­ous stud­ies that hinted at a pos­si­ble pos­i­tive effect of the Mediterranean diet on PAD patients.

PAD is a pro­gres­sive dis­ease that brings to the nar­row­ing of the arter­ies with con­se­quent impact on the blood flow, espe­cially on human limbs, but it can also impact on heart and brain.

A healthy diet is con­sid­ered essen­tial to a suc­cess­ful recov­ery from the con­di­tion which often fol­lows ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis.