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What about olive oil?

With catchy headlines on the American Heart Association website such as:

"Olive oil may lower heart disease risk"

You might think that olive oil is worth considering. Dig into the article or study and find the "compared to what?". Here's what it was compared to:

One interesting thing our study shows is that although olive oil was better than most animal fats and margarine, it was not superior to vegetable oils in this study population," Guasch-Ferre said. "This means that replacing any type of animal fat with vegetable oils, including olive oil but also others, could be a good strategy to improve cardiovascular health.

Here's another attention grabber:

"The benefits of adding a drizzle of olive oil to your diet"

and here's what the researchers found:

In cohort studies of U.S. adults, replacing margarine, butter, mayonnaise, and dairy fat with olive oil is associated with lower risks of total and cause-specific mortality.

If you're following a Whole Food, Plant Based diet then you're not eating margarine, butter, mayonnaise, dairy fat or animal fat anyway!

Get your healthy fats from whole foods such as walnuts, flax seeds, chia seeds, almonds, hemps seeds, and sunflower seeds etc. Always choose a whole food over a processed food. Moderation is important. A tablespoon of flax seeds in your oatmeal, a tablespoon of chia seeds in a kale smoothie, a tablespoon of hemp hearts or sunflower seeds on your salad.  If you're trying to reverse heart disease then be very cautious with your fat intake and follow the advice of your plant-based doctor.

Here's a good summary from Dr. Joel Fuhrman: Olive Oil is NOT a Health Food

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