O-live…I mean, I love this cake recipe loaded with anti-inflammatory oleic acid
Olive oil (and oleic acid) for high cholesterol, how to get all the nutrients you need, and my recipe for Lemon-Rosemary Olive Oil Cake
👉This week, we’re talking about: the benefits of oleic acid (and foods rich in it like olive oil) for supporting healthy cholesterol levels; how to choose a high quality extra virgin olive oil; how the Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix is a deceptively simply, analogue checklist to help you get all the nutrients you need while continuing to eat the foods you love; and I’m sharing my Lemon-Rosemary Olive Oil Cake recipe.1
Key Takeaways
✅Oleic acid is one of the most important healthy fats for improving cholesterol levels and lowering cardiovascular disease risk.
✅The reason why olive oil is so heart healthy is that it’s mostly oleic acid! I have tips on choosing a high quality extra virgin olive oil below.
✅My answer to the question “How do I make sure I’m getting enough of all of these nutrients?” is the Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix.
✅For paid subscribers, your downloads this week are: Nutrients for High Cholesterol and Lemon-Rosemary Olive Oil Cake.
Oleic Acid for High Cholesterol
🧬The most common long-chain monounsaturated fat, oleic acid, reduces cardiovascular disease risk factors like high blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, inflammation, and oxidative stress, and reduces actual cardiovascular disease incidence and events. Along with its well-established benefits for cardiovascular health, oleic acid may also help fight inflammation, protect against cancer, influence immune function, and even have anti-diabetic effects.
The health benefits of olive oil are mainly attributable to its very high oleic acid content. Countless research studies have demonstrated that olive oil can help to prevent cardiovascular disease by protecting the integrity of your vascular system and lowering your LDL “bad” cholesterol. In fact, a 2019 meta-analysis of 27 randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials showed that olive oil was the best plant oil for reducing LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol and triglycerides, and it additionally increased HDL cholesterol.
Many high-fat plant foods and vegetable oils are good sources of oleic acid, including olives and olive oil, avocado and avocado oil, palm oil and palm olein, canola oil, peanuts and peanut oil, sunflower seeds and sunflower oil (especially high-oleic sunflower oil), pecans, macadamia nuts, cashews, sesame seeds, sesame oil, grape seed oil, soybean oil, and cocoa butter.
Want to know the top 25 best food sources of oleic acid? Learn them here.
Get 11g Oleic Acid with EVOO
🫒Extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) has a Nutrivore Score of 139, and has been extracted from olives and used for thousands of years. In fact, it’s one of the oldest (and most revered!) edible oils out there, with culinary uses dating back to at least 1000 BC! Olive oil is graded based on the level of acidity—free oleic acid— and comes in various varieties including extra-virgin (highest-quality and lowest acidity, therefore richer flavor), virgin, fino, light, and pure.
Per 1-tablespoon serving, extra-virgin olive oil provides 11.3 grams of monounsaturated fat (almost all of which is oleic acid), 41% DV vitamin E (although this does vary by olive cultivar and oil extraction method), and 2.2 grams of coenzyme Q10.
Extra virgin olive oil is the 474th most nutrient-dense food! Learn the Top 500 Nutrivore Foods here.
Lemon-Rosemary Olive Oil Cake
🥗 This Lemon-Rosemary Olive Oil Cake is not only moist and spongy with a large crumb and perfect tangy flavor from the yogurt, but it combines two amazing flavors of rosemary and lemon, while also adding in amazing nutrition benefits of olive oil!
This cake recipe can easily be made into a coffee cake by baking in a Bundt pan and glazing with a simple lemon juice and honey glaze (mix one part of each, heat and then brush over the cake surface immediately after removing from the pan, while it’s still warm).
Add this recipe to your meal plan this week with Real Plans, the official Nutrivore meal planning app!
Nutrivore Mindset Corner
🧠This year, I started a new style of video for social media where I do a nutritional analysis, including calculating the Nutrivore Score, of trending recipes (watch on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook). It’s a fun way to teach about nutrients while highlighting the nutritional value of delicious, comforting recipes that many people might assume aren’t healthy because of wrong messages learned from diet culture. These videos have been popular (a special hello to everyone who subscribed to my Substack because you’ve been enjoying these videos!), and have engendered some fantastic thematic questions in the comments, which I plan to address over the next little while in my newsletters. Up first: “How do I make sure I’m getting enough of all of these nutrients?”
I love this question because that’s the heart of Nutrivore: learning the eating patterns that help you get sufficient quantities of the full range of nutrients your body needs, while staying within your calorie requirements, and without engaging in restrictive diet mentality. You could of course use one of the food journaling apps that analyzes vitamins and minerals in addition to macros; but I have a much easier, low-stress, analogue solution for you that doesn’t require weighing, measuring or overthinking your food. It’s called the Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix.
The Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix is a deceptively simple checklist that helps you:
build balanced, nutrient-dense meals,
prioritize the most nutritionally-important foods,
embrace dietary diversity and eating the rainbow,
all while leaving plenty of room for quality-of life foods.
It took me months and months of research and calculations (and many iterations with my designer to make the Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix as user-friendly as possible) to develop it; but for you, it takes just seconds to fill out each meal. Not only does following the weekly serving targets support you meeting your daily requirements of essential nutrients, but it also helps you to re-build your intuition for a healthy and balanced diet.
The Nutrivore Weekly Serving Matrix is included in my book, or as a digital product (complete with instructions, FAQ, and a fillable PDF version if you don’t want to print it off each week) on my website.
Learn everything you need to know about the Nutrivore philosophy in my book, Nutrivore: Eat Any Food, Get Every Nutrient, and Transform Your Health!
Helpful Tip of the Week
💡While all olive oil is healthy (and it’s a myth that most of the options in the grocery store are cut with vegetable oils), there are some studies showing even more health benefits from a high-polyphenol extra-virgin olive oil compared to a low-polyphenol refined olive oil. So, here are some tips for finding a high quality extra virgin olive oil:
Look for brands that list a harvest date on the bottle, which will tell you when the olives were picked. The more recent the date, the better (choose oil no older than 12 to 18 months).
Look for options in dark glass, tinplate/stainless steel cans, and bag-in-box since these are the best options for protecting the oil from oxidizing (clear plastic bottles are the least protective).
Olive oil should taste pungent and peppery, even stinging the back of your throat a bit and making you cough—that’s a sign of a high polyphenol content.
Fresher is better. Unlike vinegar or wine, olive oil does not get better with age.
Store in a cool, dark place and use within 6 months of opening.
My preference is to use a high quality extra virgin olive oil for homemade salad dressings and condiments like hummus, and to use a cheaper oil for other cooking applications.
This Week’s Downloads
📥For paid subscribers, your downloads this week are:
Nutrients for High Cholesterol - This 1-pager PDF guide lists all the nutrients that reduce risk of hypercholesterolemia along with top food sources, to give you a quick-reference for foods to add if high cholesterol is a concern for you.
Lemon-Rosemary Olive Oil Cake Recipe - A beautifully-designed PDF version of this week’s recipe that you can save or print out, to build your own personalized Nutrivore Cookbook week by week.
You can find buttons to download at the bottom of this Substack. Thank you so much for supporting my work and Nutrivore!
Sincerely,
Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, PhD
Founder of Nutrivore
Medical Disclaimer: The information provided in this Substack is for educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or dietary changes.
FTC Disclosure: Some links in this Substack may be affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products I genuinely believe in. Thank you for supporting my work!
For Paid Subscribers
