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Exploring Olive Oil's Impact on Mental Well-being

By Germana Foscale
Mar. 18, 2025 23:30 UTC
Summary Summary

Scientific evi­dence sup­ports the health ben­e­fits of the tra­di­tional Mediterranean lifestyle and dietary pat­tern, with extra vir­gin olive oil as the main source of fat. Research in nutri­tional epi­demi­ol­ogy has shown that olive oil, par­tic­u­larly its phe­no­lic com­pounds, may have ben­e­fi­cial anti-inflam­ma­tory effects that could impact men­tal health dis­or­ders. Further stud­ies are needed to under­stand olive oil’s poten­tial phar­ma­co­log­i­cal effects on men­tal health, and new research meth­ods, such as arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, may help advance nutri­tional stud­ies in the future.

A large body of sci­en­tific evi­dence, cov­er­ing many years, sup­ports the health ben­e­fits of the tra­di­tional Mediterranean lifestyle and dietary pat­tern, with extra vir­gin olive oil as the prin­ci­pal source of fat.

Nutritional epi­demi­ol­ogy, which explores the rela­tion­ship between nutri­tion and health, has a long his­tory of pro­vid­ing sci­en­tific evi­dence for imple­ment­ing nutri­tional rec­om­men­da­tions for pub­lic health pro­grams and poli­cies.

Francesco Cipriani, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist and nutri­tion­ist and mem­ber of the Georgofili Academy in Florence — a long-stand­ing Italian insti­tu­tion that pub­licly dis­cusses new sci­en­tific evi­dence in agri­cul­tural, food and envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence — put devel­op­ments in nutri­tional epi­demi­ol­ogy and olive oil research in a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive.

See Also:Health News

“With the first sci­en­tific stud­ies on health and olive oil, it was thought that the pro­tec­tive effect found in pop­u­la­tions that con­sumed more olive oil was linked to the effect of olive oil’s main com­pound, i.e., oleic acid,” Cipriani told Olive Oil Times. 

This is because ​“as a monoun­sat­u­rated fat, oleic acid keeps the build-up of cho­les­terol and related ath­er­o­scle­rotic plaques at bay.”

Following the proven ben­e­fi­cial effects of olive oil against car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases, ​“the focus of epi­demi­o­log­i­cal stud­ies shifted to other com­pounds of extra vir­gin olive oil, present in very small quan­ti­ties and bio­log­i­cally active in pre­vent­ing cel­lu­lar aging and inflam­ma­tion,” he explained.

Some research find­ings have hypoth­e­sized that cer­tain phe­no­lic com­pounds found in olive oil may have ben­e­fi­cial anti-inflam­ma­tory effects. Inflammation and oxida­tive stress are also known to play a role in the devel­op­ment of men­tal health dis­or­ders.

According to the United Kingdom’s Department of Health and Social Care, good, pos­i­tive men­tal health is the foun­da­tion for an individual’s emo­tional well-being, i.e., ​“a pos­i­tive state of mind and body, feel­ing safe and able to cope, with a sense of con­nec­tion with peo­ple, com­mu­ni­ties and the wider envi­ron­ment.”

Inappropriate diet, in par­tic­u­lar, is among some of the causes of men­tal dis­or­ders, such as anx­i­ety and depres­sion. 

These con­di­tions can lead to behav­ioral and emo­tional impair­ments and have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the qual­ity of life of many peo­ple and their com­mu­ni­ties. 

An arti­cle pub­lished at the end of 2024 in the British Journal of Nutrition pro­vided a scop­ing review of 49 human and ani­mal stud­ies, syn­the­siz­ing the cur­rently avail­able evi­dence on the ther­a­peu­tic effects of olive oil on men­tal health.

The review cited, among oth­ers, evi­dence of ben­e­fi­cial effects asso­ci­ated with adher­ence to the tra­di­tional Mediterranean diet on a series of more or less acute and, in some cases, longer-last­ing men­tal health prob­lems vary­ing in sever­ity, from anx­i­ety, depres­sion and eat­ing dis­or­ders to schiz­o­phre­nia and bipo­lar dis­or­der, com­monly known as ​‘Axis I dis­or­ders.’

More specif­i­cally, the review cited four human exper­i­men­tal stud­ies that demon­strated sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments in men­tal health symp­toms when olive oil was added to the diet but con­cluded that fur­ther neu­ro­chem­i­cal stud­ies would be needed to gain a deeper under­stand­ing of olive oil’s poten­tial phar­ma­co­log­i­cal effects on the pre­ven­tion and con­trol of men­tal dis­or­ders.

The stud­ies reviewed in 2024 were based on dif­fer­ent exper­i­men­tal designs, and there was a sig­nif­i­cant het­ero­gene­ity in sam­ple size, par­tic­i­pant char­ac­ter­is­tics, coun­try of ori­gin and a high vari­abil­ity in the daily doses of olive oil con­sumed by par­tic­i­pants.

See Also:Experts Offer Tips on Adopting the Mediterranean Diet

“To date, the reli­a­bil­ity of nutri­tional tests on ani­mals and humans is highly vari­able and, although stud­ies are ade­quately con­ducted, they can be inac­cu­rate due to var­i­ous basic method­olog­i­cal issues,” Cipriani warned.

Cipriani illus­trated some crit­i­cal aspects asso­ci­ated with epi­demi­o­log­i­cal research: ​“When choos­ing study designs, ran­dom­ized prospec­tive stud­ies [i.e., lon­gi­tu­di­nal cohort stud­ies where a group of sub­jects are fol­lowed over time to find out how many reach a cer­tain health out­come of inter­est] are to be pre­ferred, despite the fact that these stud­ies are very expen­sive and that the results are only avail­able over the long term.”

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As an epi­demi­ol­o­gist, Cipriani was involved in the ini­tial phase of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) in the 1990s. The first results have only been pub­lished recently. ​“EPIC is start­ing to look at the out­comes of many dis­eases, such as car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases, can­cer and neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems,” he said.

Nowadays, ​“to go beyond the lim­i­ta­tions of prospec­tive stud­ies, fur­ther strate­gies are being sought, such as mea­sur­ing spe­cific fac­tors in peo­ple’s blood (bio­mark­ers) that can indi­rectly indi­cate what they have eaten and what they have been exposed to, and test­ing how indices of cel­lu­lar dam­age change as these indi­ca­tors of nutri­tional expo­sure change,” Cipriani added.

However, even though ​“bio­mark­ers can pro­vide a bet­ter mea­sure­ment of food con­sump­tion and shorten the time needed to con­duct research, they have other lim­i­ta­tions and can­not over­come the method­olog­i­cal prob­lems of study­ing the rela­tion­ship between nutri­tion and dis­ease,” i.e., pro­vid­ing the most direct evi­dence for causal­ity.

Commenting fur­ther on the reli­a­bil­ity of epi­demi­o­log­i­cal stud­ies, Cipriani explained that ​“the body of evi­dence derived from gath­er­ing the results of stud­ies which have been con­ducted in var­i­ous coun­tries using dif­fer­ent meth­ods rep­re­sents a major advan­tage com­pared with the lim­ited results pro­vided by indi­vid­ual stud­ies.” 

“Special sta­tis­ti­cal pro­ce­dures (meta-analy­sis) are applied to offer evi­dence of con­sis­tency of results and can also mod­ify our pre­vi­ous find­ings,” he added. ​“This was recently the case for dried fruit, which has been found to have clear pro­tec­tive effects, and such evi­dence was not avail­able 30 years ago.”

More impor­tantly, Cipriani said arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence could pro­vide a break­through for nutri­tional stud­ies.

“[It may help] to speed up the pace of research in this field by gath­er­ing big data on con­sumers’ food pur­chases and nutri­tional pref­er­ences — includ­ing meals taken at restau­rants — and then ana­lyz­ing data anony­mously and at an aggre­gated level,” he remarked, as ​“this would pos­si­bly con­tribute to reduc­ing the already high costs of epi­demi­o­log­i­cal stud­ies which are likely to become unsus­tain­able in the long term.”

“In fact, nutri­tion research is cur­rently using rudi­men­tary meth­ods com­pared with other exper­i­men­tal research and still has a long way to go,” Cipriani argued.

Meanwhile, of inter­est is Cipriani’s con­sid­er­a­tion that ​“most prob­a­bly, there is not just one par­tic­u­lar sub­stance that pro­vides pro­tec­tion, but a col­lec­tion of mol­e­cules and active ingre­di­ents, some still unknown to date, present in food in its entirety,” a syn­ergy wel­com­ing a revival of Mediterranean dietary and culi­nary knowl­edge and prac­tices for bet­ter (men­tal) health and well-being.

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