`Oil From Wild Olives Better at Lowering Blood Pressure, Researchers Find - Olive Oil Times
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Oil From Wild Olives Better at Lowering Blood Pressure, Researchers Find

By Paolo DeAndreis
Dec. 2, 2020 13:10 UTC

Olive oil pro­duced from a wild vari­ety may have more ben­e­fi­cial impacts on low­er­ing high blood pres­sure than oils pro­duced from com­mer­cial vari­eties, accord­ing to new research from the University of Seville.

While mul­ti­ple stud­ies have shown that daily con­sump­tion of extra vir­gin olive oil can help keep blood pres­sure lev­els under con­trol and even con­tribute to low­er­ing high blood pres­sure, ace­buchina oil has fared even bet­ter in reduc­ing hyper­ten­sion.

Preliminary stud­ies have shown that ace­buchina olive oil has a higher pro­por­tion of toco­pherols (vit­a­min E) and sterols than extra vir­gin olive oil.- Researchers, University of Seville

The study is one of the first pieces of research to inves­ti­gate the effects of the olive oil made from har­vest­ing ace­buchina olives from wild trees that are found in sev­eral parts of Spain, cov­er­ing an esti­mated nine mil­lion hectares in Andalusia alone.

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Wild acebuchina olives (Pablo Esparza for Olive Oil Times)

For the past two decades, researchers have been look­ing for nat­ural com­pounds and prod­ucts that are able to affect the patho­phys­i­o­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms involved in the devel­op­ment of arte­r­ial hyper­ten­sion.

See Also:A Forgotten Treasure: Making Oil from Wild Olives

According to a press release pub­lished by the Spanish uni­ver­sity, extra vir­gin olive oil has already shown mild effects in low­er­ing blood pres­sure dur­ing tests con­ducted on mice. Now, these sci­en­tists have demon­strated that con­sump­tion of ace­buchina olive oil can sig­nif­i­cantly lower rates of hyper­ten­sion.

To assess the impact of the wild olive oil, the researchers focused on the vari­a­tions in the mor­phol­ogy of the hyper­ten­sive retina, which is a con­di­tion that reduces the thick­ness of the organ. By con­sum­ing ace­buchina olive oil, researchers found that the con­di­tion can be more effi­ciently coun­ter­acted than by con­sum­ing extra vir­gin olive oil.

In the study, which was pub­lished in the aca­d­e­mic jour­nal, Antioxidants, researchers list a long series of pre­vi­ous papers that show a wide vari­ety of health ben­e­fits related to extra vir­gin olive oil con­sump­tion.

Still, they wrote, reports on the ben­e­fi­cial effects of extra vir­gin olive oil con­sump­tion against ocu­lar dis­eases are still scarce.” There is even less avail­able research on the healthy prop­er­ties of ace­buchina olive oil, they added.

Lower anti­genic and aller­genic capac­i­ties have been attrib­uted to ace­buchina olive oil in com­par­i­son with its cul­ti­vated coun­ter­part, and pre­lim­i­nary stud­ies have shown that ace­buchina olive oil has a higher pro­por­tion of toco­pherols (vit­a­min E) and sterols than extra vir­gin olive oil,” the researchers wrote.

In the press release, the sci­en­tists explain how the need to bet­ter under­stand the healthy prop­er­ties of ace­buchina olive oil derives from its pos­si­ble impact on oxida­tive stress in wide­spread con­di­tions such as age-related mac­u­lar degen­er­a­tion, glau­coma, retini­tis pig­men­tosa and sev­eral types of retinopathies.

According to the University of Seville, hyper­ten­sion affects between 30 and 45 per­cent of the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, and may also impact dif­fer­ent organs. The con­di­tion con­sti­tutes a sig­nif­i­cant risk fac­tor for devel­op­ing car­dio­vas­cu­lar, kid­ney, brain and oph­thal­mo­log­i­cal dis­eases.



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