Olive oil is one of those bottles most of us already own. You pour it on salad, drizzle it over roasted vegetables, maybe reach for it when the butter runs out. For a long time it has been treated as the healthy fat without much specifics behind the label.
A long-running Harvard cohort has now put numbers on that goodwill. Replacing a daily spoonful of butter, margarine or mayonnaise with the same amount of olive oil was linked to lower death risk from four separate causes.
The finding comes from a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published in January 2022. Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health tracked 92,383 US adults for 28 years, with 36,856 deaths recorded over that period.
What the study found across four causes of death
People who ate more than half a tablespoon of olive oil a day had lower long-term death risk across several categories compared with those who rarely used it.
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Cause of death | Risk reduction |
|---|---|
Cardiovascular disease | 19 percent lower Also read: Running for the bus may protect your heart and brain more than a long slow walk |
Cancer | 17 percent lower |
Respiratory disease | 18 percent lower Also read: Your gut may now be missing hundreds of bacteria, scientists warn |
Neurodegenerative disease | 29 percent lower |
The clearest signal came from the swap itself. Replacing about 10 grams a day of butter, margarine, mayonnaise or dairy fat with the same amount of olive oil was linked to between 8 and 34 percent lower risk of early death, depending on the cause.
Ten grams works out to roughly two teaspoons. Swapping olive oil for other vegetable oils showed no additional benefit in the data. The gain came from pushing out the animal fats and processed spreads.
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What this means in your kitchen
The study is observational, so it cannot prove olive oil itself caused the lower death risk. People who use more olive oil often eat other things that resemble a Mediterranean pattern.
The researchers accounted for diet quality and lifestyle. But some residual effect from other healthy habits is always possible in a study like this.
Lead author Marta Guasch-Ferré put the practical message simply in a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health press release. "Clinicians should be counseling patients to replace certain fats, such as margarine and butter, with olive oil to improve their health," she said.
Half a tablespoon a day is not a large amount. A thin drizzle on toast instead of butter, or in place of mayonnaise on a sandwich, is already in the range the study linked to the lowest death risk.
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This article is made and published by Aksel Kryhlmand, who may have used AI in the preparation.