Can You Guess the #1 Ingredient that Makes EVOO a Superfood?
Superfoods are mostly plant-based, such as berries, sweet potatoes, kale, nuts and olives - just to name a few. They are nutritionally dense and therefore considered good for one's health.
These superfoods all have one thing in common. They have unique disease-fighting compounds and have significant amounts of polyphenols.
What Are Polyphenols?
Polyphenols are naturally occurring micronutrients in plants, and act as antioxidants. A growing body of research indicates that polyphenol consumption may play a vital role in health through the regulation of metabolism, weight, chronic disease, and cell proliferation.
Polyphenols may improve your health by:
- Reducing cholesterol
- Lowering blood pressure
- Improving blood circulation
- Preventing platelet clumping
- Improving your life span
One of the key components in Extra Virgin Olive Oil – is polyphenol!
With authentic, fresh extra virgin olive oil you can actually measure the polyphenols within the oil, and compare different ones to see which olive oil is the ‘healthiest’.
Did you know we test our olive oils for polyphenol count?
Each year we submit Nuvo Olive Oils to a 3rd party for lab testing because we always like to know the polyphenol count. Click here to see the analysis.
What’s great to see is that more and more people are interested and asking for olive oil with a high polyphenol count. They want to know just how many more anti-oxidants are being delivered to their bodies when they get a high polyphenol olive oil.
This year we produced a number of extra virgin olive oils. For our award winning Extra Virgin Olive Oils, we selected rare and unique varietals which we milled in our 3/4 ton vacuum sealed mill.
Harvested early in the year so that they would express their ‘greenest’ attributes and most importantly have a high polyphenol count.
The Barouni Olive
One of those varietals is the Barouni Olive. Originating in Northern Africa, this olive is typically cured and used as a table olive because of its low oil content (making it expensive to make). This olive is now homegrown, right here in Northern California!
However, if one should feel adventurous enough and decide to make oil from the Barouni olive, the resulting oil can be, well, international award winning!
This year, we decided to mill a small batch of Barouni Olives which we then mixed with some other oils (we will be highlighting these in the next couple of weeks) for our Estate Blend and our Expert Blend - both of which were honored with a Gold Medal at this year's NYIOCC - largest international olive oil competition in the world.
We thought we would share our mono-varietal olive oils with you and we wanted to start with the Barouni because this year it has the highest polyphenol count at 615/mg which is truly a superior count.
Full flavored, smoky, herbaceous, slightly pungent, peppery and bitter - if you like Nuvo’s Early Harvest, you’ll love the Barouni!
Check out this publication in Nature. It lists the 100 richest dietary sources of polyphenols.
It’s not often this full bodied, high polyphenol olive oil is made available, and we only have a limited amount.
But those lucky enough to try it are going to enrich their pallet, their food and their body!
In summary: Extra Virgin Olive Oil is a superfood with healthy amounts of polyphenols. For a limited time only, Nuvo has produced an Extra Virgin Olive Oil made from rare olives, called the Barouni Olive, which has one of highest count of polyphenols!
