This release is available in Spanish.
Health conscious consumers have long known that virgin olive oil is a good choice when it comes to preparing meals and dipping breads. Now, a team of researchers, including one with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), has found that phenolic components in olive oil actually modify genes that are involved in the inflammatory response.
The researchers knew from other studies that consuming high-phenolic-content virgin olive oil reduces pro-inflammatory, pro-oxidant and pro-blood-clotting biomarkers when compared with consuming low-phenolic-content olive oil. But they wanted to know whether olive oil's beneficial effects could be the result of gene activity.
The study, published recently in Biomed Central (BMC) Genomics, was done by a multi-institute group of researchers headed by Francisco Perez-Jimenez with the University of Cordoba, Spain. Among the researchers was ARS computational biologist Laurence Parnell, with the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University in Boston, Mass.
For the study, the researchers fed 20 volunteerswho had metabolic syndromewith two virgin olive oil-based breakfasts one at a time, after a six-week "washout" period. Metabolic syndrome is a prevalent condition often characterized as having a combination of abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, high blood pressure and poor blood sugar control, all of which increase risk for heart disease and diabetes.
One of the experimental breakfasts contained virgin olive oil with high-content phenolic compounds (398 parts per million) and the other breakfast contained olive oil with low-content phenolic compounds (70 parts per million). All volunteers consumed the same low-fat, carbohydrate rich "background" diet during both stud
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| Contact: Rosalie Marion Bliss Rosalie.Bliss@ars.usda.gov 301-504-4318 United States Department of Agriculture-Research, Education, and Economics Source:Eurekalert |
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