The new study was published in the Journals of the American College of Cardiology on January 10, 2022.
The researchers analyzed 60,582 women and 31,801 men from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, free of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer at the study baseline in 1990. A questionnaire was used every four years over the following 28 years to assess diet, asking how often they consumed specific foods and types and brands of fats and oils.
Compared to the participants who rarely or never consumed olive oil, the participants with the highest consumption had a 19% lower risk of cardiovascular mortality, 17% lower risk of cancer mortality, 29% lower risk of neurodegenerative mortality, and 18% lower risk of respiratory mortality. Substituting 10 grams per day of other fats (e.g., margarine, butter, mayonnaise, and dairy fat) with olive oil was associated with an 8-34% lower risk of total and cause-specific mortality.
"It's possible that higher olive oil consumption is a marker of an overall healthier diet and higher socioeconomic status. However, even after adjusting for these and other social economic status factors, our results remained largely the same," said Marta Guasch-Ferre, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the study's lead author.
"Our findings support current dietary recommendations to increase the intake of olive oil and other unsaturated vegetable oils. Clinicians should be counseling patients to replace certain fats, such as margarine and butter, with olive oil to improve their health. Our study helps make more specific recommendations that will be easier for patients to understand and hopefully implement into their diets," said Guasch-Ferre.
You can read more from the study here.
