Three Must-Read Books on Olive Oil for 2017

The 7 Wonders of Olive Oil
by Cecile Le Galliard and Alice Alech

Olive oil expert, taster and web jour­nal­ist Cecile Le Galliard and the food, wine and cul­ture writer (and Olive Oil Times reporter) Alice Alech have been col­lab­o­rat­ing for years pool­ing their knowl­edge for pub­li­ca­tions writ­ten in French, English and Spanish. Their new book, The 7 Wonders of Olive Oil: Stronger Bones, Cancer Prevention, Higher Brain Function, and Other Medical Miracles of the Green Nectar, released January 10 in the U.S., is the lat­est chron­i­cle on olive oil to hit book­store shelves.

As a result of Alech’s inter­est in pro­mot­ing healthy liv­ing and Le Galliard’s prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence, The 7 Wonders of Olive Oil was the nat­ural out­come.

“After years of expe­ri­ence, it seemed like a good idea to explore and put together the find­ings of researchers, nutri­tion­ists and chefs around the world,” said Le Gaillard. ​“We reached out to these experts and with their help, we spent the last year writ­ing 7 Wonders.”

“We had a hard time decid­ing which of the numer­ous ben­e­fits of extra vir­gin olive oil to fea­ture in the book,” Alech revealed. ​“More than any­thing, we wanted 7 Wonders to be inspir­ing and to show how extra vir­gin olive oil can make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence to health.”

The book explores the seven key health ben­e­fits of olive oil and how it nat­u­rally slows Alzheimer’s dis­ease, reduces the risk of strokes and heart attacks, strength­ens bones, works as an anti-inflam­ma­tory, reduces the risk of dia­betes, kills can­cer cells, and pro­tects, reju­ve­nates, and beau­ti­fies your skin.

The authors also added prac­ti­cal advice when it comes to qual­ity and authen­tic­ity, and infor­ma­tion on how to pur­chase, taste, store and cook with EVOO. They included sim­ple DIY beauty tips and favorite selected recipes. They dis­cussed the impor­tance of buy­ing high-qual­ity extra vir­gin olive oil, which in turn will give read­ers the best qual­ity of life.

The Olive Oil Diet
by Simon Poole and Judy Ridgway

Simon Poole is a physi­cian and lead­ing spe­cial­ist in the Mediterranean diet; Judy Ridgway is an olive oil expert and foodie. ​“Simon and I first met a few years ago, and imme­di­ately dis­cov­ered that we had a strong mutual inter­est in olive oil,” Ridgway told Olive Oil Times.

“His detailed knowl­edge of chem­istry and nutri­tional ben­e­fits dove­tailed with my own knowl­edge of olive oil as a won­der­ful culi­nary prod­uct. When we felt that the time had come to com­bine our knowl­edge, we decided to pour it in a book to explain the lat­est research in every­day lan­guage.

“But we wanted to go even fur­ther and present the results as a won­der­ful way of eat­ing that can help pre­vent the devel­op­ment of chronic dis­ease,” said Ridgway. The part­ner­ship resulted in The Olive Oil Diet — Nutritional secret of the orig­i­nal Superfood.

“With the under­stand­ing that fat is an inte­gral part of a healthy diet, and with olive oil being the com­mon ele­ment which binds the var­i­ous regional ver­sions of the gold stan­dard Mediterranean diet, The Olive Oil Diet takes a look at the sci­ence of this ever-present fat in the con­text of that whole diet,” Poole remarked.

“Focusing on the evi­dence unique to olive oil, but also in the con­text of food com­bi­na­tions and cook­ing, the book also describes ways in which the reader can embrace the use of olive oil in all their lives, to achieve the health­i­est diet and lifestyle.”

Winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2017 in the cat­e­gory of ​“Diet Book for the Public,” the book explains why olive oil is the orig­i­nal super­food and how a diet based around olive oil will sig­nif­i­cantly improve health, well-being and vital­ity, help­ing you main­tain an ideal weight and avoid­ing heart dis­ease, stroke and dis­eases such as can­cer, dia­betes and demen­tia.

The Olive Oil Diet goes on to look at the fac­tors that con­tribute to the pro­duc­tion of high-qual­ity EVOOs, and how to find these oils in the mar­ket­place. The main sec­tion of the book set out the seven pil­lars of the olive oil diet, namely groups of nat­ural whole­some foods from the Mediterranean and beyond, all with a base of olive oil.

With over 150 recipes and sug­ges­tions, arranged around a mod­ern lifestyle with plenty of ideas for fast food at home, healthy snacks and packed lunches, the book give hints for com­bin­ing olive oil with other foods to increase nutri­tional ben­e­fits, and sug­ges­tions for using olive oil in many ways.

It dis­pels any con­cern about how to include two or three table­spoons of olive oil in the daily diet, ​“as the olive oil diet is not a diet to take up when you want to lose weight or feel under the weather and drop again when you feel bet­ter. It is a diet for life; it is the only diet you will ever need,” said the authors.

Lekker Vet — Alles Over Olijfolie
by Gregor Christiaans

“My pas­sion for extra vir­gin olive oil started in Greece many years ago,” said Gregor Christiaans. ​“My wife’s par­ents were build­ing a house in Sitia, a port town in Crete and the guy who took care of the plumb­ing was also the pres­i­dent of the coop­er­a­tive of pro­duc­ers of Zakros. When I first taste that olive oil I fell in love with it.”

That was how the rela­tion­ship of Christiaans with EVOO started, and since then he cre­ated a com­pany that deliv­ers Mediterranean foods to over one hun­dred restau­rants in Holland. He stud­ied, attended courses, became an expert and tasted olive oils every day.

“But teach­ing myself was not enough,” said Christiaans. ​“I wanted to edu­cate con­sumers to know the dif­fer­ence between bad and good olive oils.” So, he wrote Lekker vet — alles over oli­j­folie, which lit­er­ally means ​“Awesome fat — every­thing about olive oil,” and it is also a pun on the word ​“vet,” that in Dutch also expresses the con­cept of ​“cool,” or ​“awe­some.”

This is the first book writ­ten in Dutch (the English ver­sion is also being pre­pared) with the ambi­tion to cover the world of olive oil from the field to the table, from pro­duc­tion to the impor­tance in health terms, from the voice of lead­ing experts (a Turkish food sci­en­tist, a Greek nutri­tion­ist, an Italian pro­ducer, an American insti­tute, the IOC) to the thoughts of great chefs.

Beautiful pic­tures and styl­ish illus­tra­tions con­tributed to cre­at­ing a clear and delight­ful overview of the olive oil in the world. ​“My dream-team included one of the best graphic design­ers I ever met and a great pho­tog­ra­pher, spe­cial­ized in food,” Christiaans revealed.

Interesting to note that Lekker vet was crowd­funded, ​“because I wanted to make the best book ever, with a hard cover, glam­orous images, inter­est­ing sto­ries, attrac­tive graph­ics,” Christiaans told Olive Oil Times. ​“The crowd­fund­ing suc­ceeded and I can tell that the book is superb.”