The Secret Adulteration Of Olive Oil

By James Donahue

If you think buying "organic" is going to give you an escape from the poisoned and processed garbage sold as food in our grocery stores, guess again. If you don’t know the grower or have the space and time to grow and process it yourself, you could still be getting the same old genetically modified poison.

An exposing new book by investigator Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, tells of how the processors of most of imported brands of light virgin olive oils, favored in American kitchens because of the alleged lack of unsaturated fats, are all fake mixtures of other oils and chemical additives that make them taste and smell right, but are anything but light virgin olive oil.

After Mueller’s book went into print, researchers at UC Davis tested 124 samples from eight major brands of extra virgin olive oil. They found more than 74 percent of the imported oils were not what the labels claimed them to be.

The virgin olive oil business is a $1.5 billion dollar industry in the United States, and it appears that most of this money is going into the pockets of unscrupulous racketeers willing to sell us poison oils in the interest of making a lot of money.

According to Mueller, the most common forms of adulteration involves mixing extra virgin olive oil with cheap, lower-grade oils. Some of these oils may be sunflower, soybean, canola or colza oils. Sometimes it is a poor quality olive oil. To hide the crime the blended oils are chemically deodorized with chlorophyll, colored and sometimes even flavored to make them look and taste like the real thing.

A story in the Los Angeles Times said that the UC Davis testing found most of the major brands found in our grocery stores to be fraudulently labeled. Unfortunately the crime can be traced to the processors, not the handlers. But the problem has become theirs to deal with just the same.

The real virgin olive oil will get cloudy and harden when refrigerated. This is not a sure test, however, because some of the other oil mixtures will mimic olive oil when refrigerated. Also the legitimate virgin olive oil will keep an oil lamp burning.

The only way to know for sure that you have the real thing is to try to buy directly from the producer, or buy your oil from a supplier that you trust. Good virgin olive oil is packaged in a dark colored glass bottle because it can be spoiled by sunlight. The bottle also should show a harvest or expiration date printed somewhere on the label. Never buy oil more than two years old because it will get rancid.

Ignore olive oil containers that offer "pure," or "light oil" or "olive pomace oil." This means that have been altered.