Daily Fit Tip: How to buy the best olive oil
Posted: May 9th 2008 6:00AM by Rigel Gregg
Filed under: Food and Nutrition, Daily Fit Tip

I recently got married and moved into a new house, which means I'm cooking in a new kitchen and am all inspired to start trying
new recipes. In the cabinets of
a healthy kitchen, one of the most common players is olive oil (love a good stir fry) but getting what you pay for is isn't as easy as it should be. Many stores have bottles of oil that have been sitting for ages on the shelf (which diminishes not only flavor but also antioxidant benefits) and some companies are even fraudulently blending in filler oils like sunflower or soybean oil. For the best, healthiest olive oil,
follow these tips:
- Go for the smallest brands -- smaller growers almost always produce higher quality oil than mass producers.
- Keep your olive oil cool and dark, and look for brands packaged in dark bottles.
- Read the label carefully, intentionally vague statements like "imported from Italy" can be deceiving (it wasn't necessarily made in Italy).
- "Extra virgin" isn't necessarily the best. To be labeled extra virgin, olive oil must have an acidity of 0.8% or less, which isn't that hard to do. For really good oil, look for 0.5% or less.
Tags: cooking, daily fit tip, DailyFitTip, healthy eating, HealthyEating, kitchen, oil, oils, olive oil, olive oils, OliveOil, OliveOils, recipes
Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.
When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.