Olive oil can significantly lower your risk of strokes or heart attacks

A new study shows that besides all the other health benefits of olive oil, it may also help reverse heart failure by helping the muscle pump blood more effectively.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Researchers from the University of Illinois discovered that oleate, the fat in olive oil, helps diseased hearts use body fat as energy. Healthy hearts absorb fat to keep pumping, but if the heart is damaged it can no longer process fat, or store it, so it becomes starved of energy.

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The toxic fat that the heart can't use is left in the arteries, where it can harden and clog them.

The researchers found that oleate gets genes to start producing enzymes to break down fat for the heart.

"These genes are often suppressed in failing hearts," said Douglas Lewandowski of the University of Illinois in Chicago. "So the fact that we can restore beneficial gene expression, as well as more balanced fat metabolism, plus reduce toxic fat, just by supplying hearts with oleate is a very exciting finding.

"This gives more proof to the idea that consuming healthy fats can have a significantly positive effect on cardiac health."

The scientists looked at how the hearts of rats responded to oleate, or palmitate, the fat that is found in fats from animals and dairy. When oleate was consumed, the heart started to work much more efficiently.

"We saw an immediate improvement in how the hearts contracted and pumped blood," said Lewandowski.

When the palmitate was consumed, the diseased hearts become less efficient, and more toxic fat was produced.

Former research found that a diet that was high in olive oil can be as effective at reducing heart attack risk as some medicines, like statins.

Scientists in Spain found that a group of volunteers assigned to a Mediterranean style diet had a 30% smaller risk of having a heart attack or stroke over a five year period compared with a randomly selected group on a low fat diet.

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