It’s not just about the polyphenols

The polyphenol content in olive oil is arguably its most important feature - but it is far from everything.

More recently there has been a rise of influencers and comparison websites recommending oils freely, without much quality control or scientific backing. Many websites are putting forward oils with questionable production backgrounds, unfiltered oils, and oils with a potentially excessive amount of polyphenols.

Here at highpolyphenololiveoil.co.uk we have developed a unique scoring system that takes into account all of the important quality metrics that go into a quality olive oil. Rewarding producers for delivering oils that meet these strict parameters and hopefully making it easy for you, the consumer, to quickly and easily identify polyphenol oils worth purchasing. This scoring system is called EVOO Score, and you can read more about it here.

One of the main issues with other comparison websites that have come about more recently, to take advantage of the popularity of high polyphenol oils, is the recommendation of oils with extremely high levels of polyphenols. These products may look tempting at first when you read about the benefits of polyphenols but it’s important to understand that more does not always mean better. Our oil selection is handpicked, with care and limits put in place to make sure we are not recommending oils that go too far above what is currently recommended in the scientific research. For example, our EVOO Score system stops awarding a producer points above 1,250 mg/Kg - ensuring we don’t over-reward producers for polyphenol levels that are much higher than the scientific research has currently tested.

Unfiltered oils is another area that we try to leave out of the selection we promote. Unfiltered oils naturally come with a higher polyphenol content. This may look like a positive at first, but the issue with unfiltered oils is that large olive particles are left in the oil. These larger olive particles then react with sunlight, causing an accelerated oxidisation process in the oil. As a result, the shelf-life of the oil becomes much shorter and the oil loses its nutritional qualities much faster. Olive oil filtration is an expensive step during the olive oil production process, this combined with the fact that you naturally lose some polyphenols during filtration causes lower quality producers to completely skip the step, leaving the consumer with arguably an inferior product at the end of the day. Our EVOO Score system automatically factors in whether an oil is filtered or not, awarding points to producers that go through with the filtration process.