Colleen Asks:  My husband, upon hearing of all the benefits of olive oil, insists that a person cannot eat too much olive oil. He drenches things with olive oil. I have read that 2 tablespoons a day should be the max.

Dr Deane responds:  Olive oil is not a drug which mitigates poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Drenching a dinner of hamburgers and fries in olive oil would be frowned upon by most nutritionists and doctors.

In some Mediterranean diets fats constitute up to 30-40 percent of calories. If you ate 2200 calories a day (small woman) and 30% was fat, that would be 660 calories from fat. If all of the fat was added in the form of olive oil (none of the foods contained fat to begin with) then you would be adding about 5 tablespoons of olive oil.

This could vary greatly from meal to meal. Say you ate a breakfast of cereal with milk and nuts; you would be consuming a share of your fat for the day in the form of nuts, dairy and grains. For dinner you ate a fatty cut of beef and avocado and tomato: you have eaten your day's complement of fat without ever adding olive oil.

Another day you might have bread for breakfast that was made with olive oil and for dinner you have salad with olive oil dressing and pasta with olive oil on top. All your fat calories came from olive oil that day; 5 tablespoons may be quite reasonable that day.

Tina Asks:  I do a a lot of wok cooking and would like to make a ginger oil. Can I use fresh ginger??

Olive Oil News responds:  You can put ginger in oil to make ginger oil but you must keep it in the refrigerator and use it up in a few weeks or it will spoil. The alternative is to dehydrate the ginger in a food dehydrator or in the sun, then you could leave the ginger in the oil for long periods, or you could heat process the oil and ginger in sealed bottles just like you would with canned fruit or vegetables. You could also use the fresh ginger but remove it after a few days along with any water at the bottom of the bottle, then the oil would keep. The problem is that foods with water such as fresh ginger will spoil. The oil won't spoil but you could get botulism growing in any watery ingredient in the oil.

As far as which vegetable oil, you could use peanut, corn, olive, soy or any other vegetable oil. Peanut oil has a high smoke point and is cheap, which is why it is used in wok cooking but you could easily use olive oil instead.

Merritt Edmund of Balzana Olive Oil Writes:  In your answer to Patsy you state" olive oil is high in natural antioxidants". Theoretically this is possible, and achieved by a small number of producers, but practically, I would suggest that most olive oil produced each year to be low in antioxidants. Here is my reasoning and would you comment on it's veracity.  Olive polyphenol content = antioxidants = pungency or the "peppery hot" sensation in the mouth when eating olive oil. Some olive types are naturally low in polyphenol content to start with but, generally, unripe or green olives contain high polyphenol levels which fade as the olive ripens to purple then black. Since most olive oil is made from low polyphenol content olives (arbequina,etc.) or ripe olives (higher yield, easier to harvest) it would seem to follow that most olive oil has a low rather than high antioxidant content. Taste the hundreds and hundreds of oil brands in the marketplace and you will find few with pungency or medium to high antioxidant value.

OO News replies:   "High in natural antioxidants" is relative to other common cooking oils which have so few antioxidants that they must be added to extend shelf life.

Roxanne Asks:  I am applying to be an editor of the Open Directory Project have often thought that your sight might be more useful if you added a sub category of olive varieties, and another one for certification.

For Example we are an A.O.C. Olive Farm in France and it is very difficult to get this designation from the Government. Being an A.O.C. farm puts our farm on a much higher level then joe smoe olive.

Olive Oil News Replies:  Thank you for your interesting critique. Although international listings are displayed on the Oliveoilsource.com site, the listings are really coming from www.bulkoil.com. That site is more interested in trading all sorts of edible oils. As you said, anyone can put a listing there, and there is no authentication of the information (although several truly irrelevant entries are discarded every day). Confirming information and sorting by certification on every edible oil producer in the world on the Bulkoil.com site is not feasible.

Conversely, the California listings are not published until we independently confirm all information. Producers who are certified by the California Olive Oil Council are identified, as are their individual products. You can sort by certification (COOC, organic, kosher, etc).  You can sort by variety in the orchard and by variety in the oil.

Kathy asks: I take Coumadin because of a mitral valve replacement. Does the vitamin K content, in proportion to the amount used in most recipes, have any impact on the effectiveness of Coumadin?

Dr Deane answers: Vitamin K has a great effect on coumadin's ability to decrease blood clotting. It is commonly used for coumadin over dosages. There is not enough Vitamin K in olive oil though, to be concerned about. There are some foods which can affect your INR or blood clotting test results. As long as you eat roughly the same amount of these foods every day your doctor or anticoagulation nurse can adjust your coumadin dose accordingly.

Miriam Asks: I'm on a low-sodium diet and I love olives. Can you give me a nutritional profile of olives or at least the amount of sodium in one black or green olive, please?

Dr. Deane responds: Processing methods for different olives vary greatly as do their size.  Your best bet is to look at the sodium information on the label.  In general,  canned black olives are lower in salt than bottled green olives.  An olive which will spoil if un-refrigerated is usually lower in salt than one which requires no refrigeration. (The same goes for pickles.)

Linda Asks: My sister and I have had a discussion about Olive Oil. She insists that because it solidifies in the refrigerator and Wesson Oil does not, that olive oil will clog your arteries.

Can you explain the reason for the coagulation?

Also, I've read that some olive oil companies are adulterating olive oil with other oils and selling it. How can we be sure we are getting extra virgin oil when we buy it?

OO News replies: All good questions.  We wrote an article about oil solidifying in our newsletter . Most of the solids are waxes just like the natural waxes on the skin of an apple. Your body doesn't absorb these waxes so they can't clog up your arteries. Your sister has a simplistic idea of the digestion process. Using her logic you shouldn't eat taffy or peanut butter either, as it would clog up your arteries.

The only way to make sure you are not getting unadulterated oil is to buy California oil with the California Olive Oil Council (COOC) seal on the bottle. The seal guarantees the oil has been tested and tasted according to internationally agreed procedures. The California Olive Oil Council is negotiating new labeling rules with the USDA to make it a crime to mislabel oil (there is currently no US definition for extra virgin and therefore no penalty for mislabeling).