Frequent Olive Oil Consumption May Reduce Risk of Blood Clots

New research found eat­ing olive oil at least once a week was asso­ci­ated with lower platelet activ­ity in obese adults.

Since platelets are involved in blood clot for­ma­tion, this effect could reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke. Olive oil is a vital part of the Mediterranean diet, which has been linked to car­dio­vas­cu­lar ben­e­fits.

Platelets are frag­ments of blood cells that bind together when acti­vated. When a blood ves­sel suf­fers harm, platelets rush to the dam­aged site to form a plug; how­ever, this ben­e­fi­cial process can become a threat to health.

Platelets also con­tribute to the for­ma­tion of artery-clog­ging plaque, called ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis, which under­lies the major­ity of heart attacks and strokes, Sean P. Heffron, the lead author of the study and an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at New York University’s School of Medicine, explained.

The par­tic­i­pants in the study were 63 obese non­smok­ing adults with an aver­age age of 32 and an aver­age body mass index (BMI) of 41. Anyone with a BMI of more than 30 is con­sid­ered obese.

Heffron and his col­leagues used food fre­quency ques­tion­naires to deter­mine how often the indi­vid­u­als con­sumed olive oil.

Analysis showed that par­tic­i­pants who ate olive oil at least once a week had less platelet acti­va­tion than those who ate it less fre­quently. In addi­tion, those who con­sumed olive oil most often had the least level of platelet accu­mu­la­tion.

The research team believes that aside from the plen­ti­ful amount of antiox­i­dants in olive oil, the anti-platelet action has some­thing to do with the struc­ture of its mol­e­cules.

“People who are obese are at increased risk of hav­ing a heart attack, stroke or other car­dio­vas­cu­lar event, even if they don’t have dia­betes or other obe­sity-asso­ci­ated con­di­tions,” Heffron said. ​“Our study sug­gests that choos­ing to eat olive oil may have the poten­tial to help mod­ify that risk, poten­tially low­er­ing an obese per­son’s threat of hav­ing a heart attack or stroke.”

“To our knowl­edge, this is the first study to assess the effects of dietary com­po­si­tion, olive oil specif­i­cally, on platelet func­tion in obese patients,” coau­thor Ruina Zhang, a NYU med­ical stu­dent, added.

The study had sev­eral lim­i­ta­tions. It relied on self-report­ing of olive oil con­sump­tion, and it didn’t include infor­ma­tion on the quan­tity con­sumed.

Moreover, because the inves­ti­ga­tion was obser­va­tional, it showed a link rather than a cause-effect rela­tion­ship. Results were recently pre­sented at a meet­ing of the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention | Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2019.

In addi­tion to platelet acti­va­tion, other fac­tors influ­ence car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, one of which is inflam­ma­tion. Physician Nikola Djordjevic, founder and project man­ager of MedAlertHelp.org, told Olive Oil Times how a com­po­nent of olive oil helps reme­di­ate this con­di­tion.

“One of the best prop­er­ties of oleic acid, a monoun­sat­u­rated fat that makes up three-fourths of olive oil, is that it reduces inflam­ma­tion,” she said. ​“This, in turn, is ben­e­fi­cial for the health of your arter­ies, as long-term inflam­ma­tion can cause dam­age that leads to ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis. Thus, olive oil can play a major role in pre­vent­ing heart dis­ease and stroke.”

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