World Olive Oil Consumption Hasn't Risen Since 2003, Even With 1B More People

You can say what you want about the proven health ben­e­fits of olive oil. How it’s the cor­ner­stone of the famous Mediterranean diet. How count­less stud­ies over the past decade have shown it helps com­bat can­cer, Alzheimer’s, dia­betes, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease. People who eat olive oil even have larger brains. They tend to be hap­pier.

Yet even with the health ben­e­fits of olive oil firmly estab­lished and with more high-qual­ity olive oils avail­able to us now than ever before, humans choose less-healthy seed oils 97 per­cent of the time.

Olive oil con­sump­tion has­n’t budged in 14 years. This accord­ing to the International Olive Council (IOC) whose job is to pro­mote its con­sump­tion world­wide. Even with nearly 1.2 bil­lion more mouths to feed, we’re eat­ing less olive oil now than we did in 2003 — when they still made Volkswagen Beetles.

In 2003, the world­wide per capita annual con­sump­tion of olive oil was 452 ml. Today, it’s around 391 ml. That does­n’t say much for the size of our brains.

And we can’t blame this one on social media. In fact, Instagram is ablaze with food porn fea­tur­ing streaks of green gold which we flip through as we reach for that big yel­low bot­tle of Canola or corn oil. (By ​‘we’ I mean you.)

Celebrity chefs have been out-hyper­boliz­ing each other into a frenzy — one even coined the term ​‘EVOO’ (then promptly proved she knew almost noth­ing about it).

And yet here we all are, eat­ing on aver­age about 2/10 of a tea­spoon a day of olive oil (even with the help of our Greek friends). We eat at least 30 times as much rape­seed oil.

The IOC declined a request for com­ments on the return of olive oil con­sump­tion to Nokia-phone-era lev­els. The inter­gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion has been strapped for cash ever since the European Commission, under pres­sure from the seed oil lobby, pulled much of the IOC’s fund­ing, accord­ing to Fausto Luchetti who ran the IOC from 1987 until 2002.

Luchetti, who was recently cleared, after 15 years, of charges of finan­cial impro­pri­eties stem­ming from his tenure in Madrid, led the IOC dur­ing its hey­day when olive oil con­sump­tion nearly dou­bled. It’s been flat ever since.

“When I took office in 1987, olive oil con­sump­tion in the U.S. reached 25,000 tons, half of which were ester­i­fied oils,” Luchetti told Olive Oil Times. ​“I real­ized that the first thing we had to do was to improve qual­ity. If we wanted con­sump­tion to increase, we needed a prod­uct that really cor­re­sponded to what we said about extra vir­gin olive oil with its nutri­tional prop­er­ties, organolep­tic and bio­log­i­cal val­ues, and so on.”

“Until the mid-80s the typ­i­cal American con­sumer of olive oil was still the immi­grant from the Mediterranean area, espe­cially Italian, who did not pay atten­tion to qual­ity and con­sumed a prod­uct that had very lit­tle to do with extra vir­gin olive oil,” Luchetti added. ​“For years, con­sump­tion was sub­ject to stag­na­tion, around 15 – 20,000 tons, because con­sumers were those poor peo­ple unable to afford high costs for fats in their diet.”

Luchetti set out to improve prod­uct qual­ity while the group engaged researchers. ​“We cre­ated a net­work of researchers who stud­ied the prop­er­ties of extra vir­gin olive oil and led to results which have been widely accepted.”

“Basically, since the mid-80s until the early 1990s, we tried to sen­si­tize poten­tial con­sumers, espe­cially Americans, through the dis­sem­i­na­tion of sci­en­tific knowl­edge,” Luchetti recalled. ​“We finally started to reap the rewards of our work with the International Conference on the Mediterranean Diet at the Harvard School of Public Health, in 1993, which defin­i­tively pop­u­lar­ized the prop­er­ties of extra vir­gin olive oil.”

“Today, the IOC no longer does sci­en­tific research, and, in this sense, I would like to stress the Organization’s atti­tude that (pro­mot­ing sci­en­tific research) is no longer nec­es­sary since (they believe) what has already been done was suf­fi­cient,” Luchetti said.

The IOC might be right about that. Studies on the health ben­e­fits of extra vir­gin olive oil — and the Mediterranean diet — have piled on top of one another since Luchetti’s tenure at the Council, with or with­out the group’s fund­ing.

It might be right to assume that the health­ful­ness of extra vir­gin olive oil is com­mon knowl­edge by now. Unfortunately, just as per­va­sive is the con­fu­sion. Consumers are sus­pi­cious of olive oil qual­ity and most are unable to deter­mine whether the oil they are buy­ing is authen­tic or not.

People know extra vir­gin olive oil is healthy. They also watched the 60 Minutes seg­ment on Mafia’s role in Italian agribusi­ness with images of police trained in olive oil tast­ing. They read the now infa­mous New York Times info­graphic — the one that no writer would admit to pen­ning — that con­tained so many inac­cu­ra­cies, the Times redacted much of it, albeit long after the dam­age had been done.

And they heard about the bomb­shell UC Davis study, financed by California olive oil pro­duc­ers, that called out imported olive oils as frauds (though some domes­tic ones were too), issu­ing a 2010 report that has been twisted, dis­torted and overblown in sen­sa­tional media cov­er­age ever since.

In the oil aisle, peo­ple are hear­ing in one ear how healthy the EVOO is, while the other ear rings with mis­trust and sus­pi­cion: Leave the olive oil, take the Canola.

“I believe we are see­ing the effect of neg­a­tive sto­ries about olive oil qual­ity and reli­a­bil­ity,” said Joseph R. Profaci, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the North American Olive Oil Association.

“The begin­ning of the sharp decline in con­sump­tion growth cor­re­sponds with the release of the UC Davis reports and has con­tin­ued to today as those reports and oth­ers have been regur­gi­tated ad nau­seam — usu­ally by mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion, inten­tional or oth­er­wise — in the form of click­bait and mis­lead­ing pro­mo­tional sto­ries,” Profaci said. ​“The neg­a­tive news is cre­at­ing a bar­rier to get­ting new users into the cat­e­gory.”

Those new users, how­ever, would­n’t be as sus­cep­ti­ble to the mis­in­for­ma­tion if they were empow­ered to decide for them­selves if an olive oil is as good as it should be. The basic prob­lem is that most don’t know how a good extra vir­gin olive oil should taste in the first place.

In fact, there are more high-qual­ity olive oils avail­able to us now than at any time in his­tory. High-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil should have aro­mas of fresh fruit; it should be bit­ter on the sides of the tongue; it should sting in the throat.

Here are 521 brands, from 22 coun­tries. They are this year’s award win­ners at the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition. Find a few, buy them and learn how great an extra vir­gin olive oil can be. Then com­pare it to the oil you were using and tell some friends. And feel your brain get­ting big­ger.