Olive Oil Calories and Nutritional Values

In this article we will focus our attention on the calories contained in extra virgin olive oil and its nutritional values. Are you following a low-calorie diet and want to know more about olive oil consumption? Do you know the properties of extra virgin olive oil, unmatched in other foods?

In this article we will answer these and other questions. Let’s start now by checking how many calories a tablespoon of oil contains.

INDEX

• Olive oil calories
• Does olive oil make you gain weight?
• Olive oil fats: why they are good
• Vitamins in olive oil
• Nutritional values of olive oil
• Conclusions

Olive oil calories

Let’s start by saying that 100 g of olive oil contains 900 kcal. A tablespoon contains approximately 10 g of oil: it follows that a tablespoon of oil contains approximately 90 calories.

In the Mediterranean diet, the consumption of approximately 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil is recommended. This means we can consume 260 kcal for our daily diet. That said, it is important to understand why to maintain the use of oil even during a diet and why it is not necessary to eliminate it or replace it with another food. So let’s answer this question: does olive oil make you gain weight? Let’s see.

Does olive oil make you gain weight?

We said that olive oil contains calories. We can say that potentially it is a food that can make you gain weight but, in reality, this is not the case. We can even say that the fats contained in olive oil are monounsaturated and therefore healthy. For this reason, oil is a food to use even for those who need to lose weight, with a certain moderation, but without eliminating it. We are therefore talking about “harmless” calories that are good for our body. But how? Let’s see below by discovering more about the fats contained in olive oil and what the nutritional values are.

Read also: Specific gravity of olive oil: what it is and how to calculate it

Olive oil fats: why they are “good”

The fats contained in olive oil are precious for our body. One of the most important saturated fats contained in oil is linoleic acid. This fat has the task of controlling and rebalancing cholesterol levels in the blood. It is said to be hypocholesterolemic, that is, it helps to lower cholesterol, the one defined as “bad”. With this premise, olive oil is an excellent ally for our health because it keeps away the risk of heart attacks, strokes or thrombosis.

Vitamins in olive oil

Before moving on to talk about nutritional values and given how important oleic acid is, we want to emphasize the presence of vitamins in olive oil. We are talking about vitamin E which, as we have also seen in our article on skin care, helps to counteract aging and free radicals, fighting oxidative stress. It also contains a small percentage of Vitamin A and D. The first has antioxidant power, the second helps to fight diseases such as osteoporosis, maintaining a healthy balance on bone health and that of the nervous system.

That said, let’s define the picture on nutritional values.

Nutritional values of olive oil

From what we have written above, you will have understood that olive oil is rich in nutrients that are important for humans and their health. Among the main ones we remember:

• Vitamin E;
• linoleic acid;
• polyphenols;
• monounsaturated fats;
• polyunsaturated fats.

Speaking of how important olive oil is in our diet, it follows that it is not advisable to eliminate it or replace it. With the same calories, no other oil offers qualities equal to extra virgin olive oil. For this reason, even in the case of a low-calorie diet, it is recommended at most to reduce the quantity to 2 tablespoons per day and to use it raw, so that it maintains all its beneficial properties.

Furthermore, we remember that we have already talked about how important it is to maintain the use of EVO oil in our diet, when we talked about the benefits of oil on the nervous system. Olive oil in fact helps to slow down the aging process, preventing dementia and reducing cognitive decline.

Read also: EVO Oil: What It Is and Meaning of the Acronym

But not only on the nervous system, but also on the digestive system, oil offers excellent reasons not to abandon it. We have in fact already talked about how positively it affects digestion, the liver and the biliary tract (here the in-depth article), also counteracting constipation problems.

Conclusions

For all these reasons, it is important to maintain in the diet the consumption of extra virgin olive oil of at least 2 tablespoons per day, despite containing calories, which we can however define as “harmless”.