Olive oil: the largest uncounted number in your kitchen

Most of this page is about quality, heat and polyphenols, and all of it is secondary to one thing.

Olive oil is pure fat, it carries around 120 calories a tablespoon, and it is poured rather than measured. That single habit undoes more camp plans than any nutritional consideration on this site.

The arithmetic first

That middle row is the problem. A pour that coats the base of a pan properly is commonly two to three tablespoons, and nobody writes it down because it did not feel like food.

The fix is to measure oil rather than avoid it: a tablespoon into the pan rather than a pour, or a spray bottle for the days when you want the pan coated without the calories.

Everything below this section is true and none of it matters as much.

The measuring problem, in detail

• Cooking oil in a pan. The largest single source. Non-stick pans need considerably less than the habit suggests.
• Dressing on a salad. Restaurant and shop-bought dressings are oil-based, and a heavy one on a large salad can carry 200 calories or more.
• Oil absorbed by food. Anything fried takes some up, and breaded or coated items take considerably more than a plain piece of meat.
• Oil inside shop-bought products. Sauces, pesto, hummus and prepared foods carry oil that never appears on a mental total because it arrived inside something else.

The intervention for all four is the same and it is unglamorous. Measure with a spoon, use a spray for coating, and read labels where the ingredient list starts with an oil.

The smoke point myth

The common claim is that extra virgin olive oil should not be used for cooking because its smoke point is too low.

Two things wrong with that.

Extra virgin olive oil smokes somewhere around 190 to 215 degrees Celsius depending on quality and freshness. Average stovetop cooking sits around 160 to 180. Most home cooking is comfortably inside the range.

More importantly, smoke point is a poor measure of whether an oil suits heat. Cooking is not done at smoke point, and stability under heat depends on composition rather than the temperature at which an oil begins to visibly smoke.

On that measure olive oil does well. It is predominantly monounsaturated, which resists oxidation better than polyunsaturated fats, and it carries polyphenols acting as antioxidants that protect the oil itself.

A study comparing heated peanut oil with extra virgin olive oil found more heat was required to begin oxidation in the olive oil.

And the polyphenols survive better than expected

The next objection is that heating destroys what makes extra virgin olive oil worth buying.

Partly true and less than claimed.

When phenolic compounds were measured through heating, oleocanthal was the most stable of those tested, with very little lost. An oil starting with a high phenol content also loses proportionally less than one starting low.

Which produces a practical conclusion. If you are going to cook with olive oil, a good one is worth more than a cheap one, because it has more to lose and loses less of it.

If you are going to use olive oil raw, in a dressing or over finished food, that is where the phenol content is fully preserved and where the argument for a high-quality oil is strongest.

How to judge one without a laboratory

Two other practical markers. Dark glass rather than clear, because light degrades the oil. And a harvest date rather than only a best-before date, since olive oil does not improve with age and a bottle 2 years past harvest has lost much of what you paid for.

Store it in a cupboard, capped, away from the stove. Heat, light and air are the three things that ruin it, and a bottle kept next to the hob is exposed to all three.

The absorption effect, at a fraction of the cost

The mechanism described under avocado applies here and applies more cheaply.

Fat-soluble compounds in vegetables need fat present to be absorbed. Carotenoids from tomato, leafy greens, peppers and salsa are absorbed far more completely when eaten with fat than without.

Olive oil in a dressing does that job for a few pence, and it is the reason undressed salad is a worse choice than it looks. You save 50 calories and lose part of what you were eating the salad for.

For a fighter managing a budget, this is the cheapest way to get that effect. Avocado does the same thing and costs several times more.

Where it sits in fight week, and why it differs from nuts

Olive oil carries no fibre. None at all.

Which means it does not create the residue problem that removes nuts, avocado and seeds from the final days. On that criterion it is fine.

What it does do is slow gastric emptying, because all fat does, and in the last days and on fight day that is the variable being managed.

So the answer is not out, it is reduced. Small amounts in cooking are workable through the low-residue phase. Large amounts, fried food and oil-heavy sauces are not.

One of the few foods in the fats group where the answer is a quantity rather than a yes or no.

Why it still belongs in the diet

Nothing above is an argument for removing fat, and that is worth saying clearly because the natural response to a calorie warning is elimination.

Fat is required. It carries the fat-soluble vitamins, it is structurally necessary, and diets pushing fat very low tend to fail on palatability and on satiety.

General guidance for athletes puts fat at roughly 20 to 35 percent of total energy, and going meaningfully below the bottom of that range for an extended period is a poor trade in a hard camp.

So olive oil is a food with a high calorie density that needs measuring rather than avoiding, which is a different instruction and produces a different diet.

The version that fails is the fighter who removes all visible fat, finds the food unbearable, and abandons the plan in week five.

The grades, briefly

Light means light in flavour, not in calories. Every olive oil carries the same energy per tablespoon, and any product suggesting otherwise is describing taste.

A note on adulteration

Olive oil is among the more commonly adulterated foods in the world, typically diluted with cheaper refined oils and sold as extra virgin.

For a fighter this is not a safety issue and it is a value issue. You are paying for polyphenols and buying a blend that does not contain them.

The taste test above is the practical defence. An oil with no bitterness and no throat catch is either poor, old, or not what the label says.

For anybody under anti-doping rules, this is food fraud rather than contamination in the supplement sense. Olive oil is not a category associated with prohibited substances.

Other cooking oils, in one paragraph each

Rapeseed and canola: neutral flavour, higher smoke point, more polyunsaturated fat and therefore less oxidatively stable. Fine for high heat, and carrying none of what makes olive oil interesting.

Coconut oil: highly saturated, very stable, and the health claims attached to it have not held up.

Its saturated fat content is both the reason it is stable and the reason it is not a default.

Butter and ghee: butter contains milk solids that burn at lower temperatures; ghee has them removed and tolerates more heat. Both are saturated fats used for flavour rather than for any nutritional argument.

Seed oils generally: a topic attracting more controversy online than the evidence supports. The practical position for a fighter is that the total quantity of oil in a diet matters considerably more than which oil it was.

Where it sits by phase

Measure it and stop worrying about smoke

• Measure it. A tablespoon is 120 calories and a pour is three of them.
• You can cook with extra virgin. The smoke point argument is weaker than it sounds, and stability matters more.
• Buy one that makes you cough. That burn is the compound you are paying for.
• Use it raw in a dressing where you can, because that is where the polyphenols and the absorption effect both apply.
• And in the final days reduce it rather than removing it. Not a residue problem. A speed problem.