You're Buying Fake Olive Oil, Here's Why

August 13, 2024 Dr Livingood

Could the olive oil you’re buying be fake?

Extra virgin olive oil is the gold standard of olive oil, but producers have started to get tricky and add other types of oil into the olive oil.

I’m going to break this down for you, and even show you how to get real oil.

Fake Olive Oils

Researchers from the University of California, Davis partnered with Australian scientists to test international olive oils and olive oils produced in California.

They found that 69% of international oils failed to meet internationally accepted standards for extra virgin olive oil.

Those studies found that 60% of the extra virgin olive oils imported into the United States have this problem.

This is because the European Union isn’t monitoring or testing the oils enough, when it’s usually the opposite.

In a 2017 Danish study, they found that only 6 out of 35 products that claimed to be extra virgin olive oil actually were.

This can actually make a lot of people sick, because manufacturers put rancid canola oil in it.

What You Should & Shouldn’t Buy

One way to tell if your olive oil contains other oils is the color.

Pure extra virgin olive oil is pretty green in color.

If your olive oil looks yellow, it probably has canola, safflower, or sunflower oil mixed in.

When they did these studies, they found that over 90% of California olive oils were exactly what they said they were, and they were much more tightly regulated.

This means you should try to make sure that any of the olive oils you use come from the United States.

Now, if an oil says that it’s blended, you’re asking for oils from different locations. You should try to buy an oil that only comes from one source.

If you can’t find single-sourced, try to at least find a California- or U.S.-sourced oil.

It’s also important to know that you should never heat up any kind of olive oil because if you do, you run the risk of denaturing it.

Extra virgin olive oil is the type that I recommend because it’s made by smashing the olives with machinery as opposed to heating them.

If olive oil’s smoking, it’s already rancid.

That’s why I really like using things like avocado oil for cooking with high heat, because it’s very stable and you can heat it hotter without it going rancid.

Coconut oil is another good one that you are able to heat to a high temperature, and other oils can’t really be mixed or blended into it.

You want to be careful with olive oil because it’s the one that’s often blended with other oils.

If you want to know more about the best cooking oils to shop for, you can join me in the grocery store here.