About the Nutrients in Olives

Green olives are olives that were picked before they are ripened. Black olives were picked ripe and dipped in an iron solution to stabilize their color. After they are picked, green lives and black olives are soaked in a milk solution of sodium hydroxide and then washed thoroughly in water to remove oleuropein, a naturally bitter carbohydrate.

Then green olives may be allowed to ferment before they are packed in a brine solution. Black olives are not allowed to ferment before packaging, which is why they taste milder than most green olives. Green olives that do not ferment before packing taste as mild as black olives.

Nutriment

Greek and Italian olives are black olives that taste sharp because they have not been soaked to remove their oleuropein. They are salt-cured and sold in bulk, covered with olive oil that protects them from oxygen and helps preserve them. Olives are a high fiber, high fat food that derive 69 to 78 percent of their calories from olive oil, a predominantly unsaturated fat.

A serving of five olives, green or black, weighing 19 to 22 g, has 2 g fat. A serving of ripe olives has 1 g dietary fiber while green olives has less than 1 g. Those that are on low-fat and low-sodium diet should exclude or avoid this food.

When buying olives, look for tightly sealed bottles or cans. Small olives are less woody than large ones. Green olives have a more astringent taste than black olives. Greek olives, available only in bulk, have a sharp spicy taste. Pitted olives are the best buy if you want to slice the olives into a salad, otherwise olives with pits are less-expensive and a better buy.

Always store unopened cans or jars of lives on a cool, dry shelf. Once you've opened a can of olives, take the olives out of the can and refrigerate them in a clean glass container. In order to avoid having the olives taste too salty, bathe them in olive oil before using.

Olives are also processed for its oil. They are pressed to produce olive oil, one of the few vegetable oils with a distinctive flavor and aroma. Olive oils are graded according to the pressing from which they come and the amount of free oleic acid they contain. The presence of free oleic acid means that the oil's molecules have begun to break down. Virgin olive oil is oil from the first pressing of the olives. Pure olive oil is a mixture of oils from the first and second pressings. Virgin olive oil may contain as much as 4 percent free oleic acid. Fine virgin olive oil may contain 3 percent free oleic acid, superfine virgin olive oil 1.5 percent, and extra virgin olive oil 1 percent.

Olive oil is a more concentrated source of alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E) than olives. Because it is high in unsaturated fatty acids, whole carbon atoms have double bonds than can make room for more oxygen atoms, olive oil oxidizes and turns rancid fairly quickly if exposed to heat or light. To protect the oil, store it in a cool and dark cabinet.

About the Nutrients in Olives

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Ancient Greek Food - Olives

Today, you go to the store and buy a little container of olives. You can get them in all different shapes sizes colors, and more. You can buy them with pimentos in them or not. Many wonder how this food became such an important part of Greek culture and large part of their diet.

Ancient Greeks used olives as there main source of fat instead of meat from animal because they thought it was an unhealthy way of getting fat, since the barbarians (non Greeks) ate that way. In actuality, the barbarians ate meat and their products such as milk and cheese because they were nomadic and had no way of growing an olive tree or preparing olives if they saw any.

Food

Preserving olives was possible because there was salt everywhere! Since Ancient Greece was a huge island basically, salt was easily accessible and allowed them to preserve olives with ease.

To preserve their olives, first ancient Greeks would gather them while they where not ripe. They left them in eater that they changed every 12 hours with water that contains wood ash and then again cleared the water. It might have taken a week. To decrease the time sometimes they would cut them with a knife. They, oil would come forth from the olives but this was just used to help preserve them. They were then kept in wine, vinegar, and salty water.

Olive oil was created to help preserve the olives. Olive oil was a great source of the Ancient people's diet because it was their main source of fat. You might think that fish was a main source of their diet, but these things were very expensive so common people mainly just had olive oil. It is not as it is today where people eat a large variety of food no matter who they are. Ancient Greece was a very socially unequal place.

If you ever dip bread in olive oil, you are carrying out the actions of an aristocratic meal. In ancient times, common Greeks mostly ate porridge and not bread for carbohydrates. Bread was a lot of work to make and was not a common food among them.

Today, olives are eaten by anyone who has a few bucks and can walk or drive to a store. Not so in the days of past. Still, ancient Greeks still figured they could turn tiny strange spherical objects on a tree into a delicious and nutritious food for all of the Mediterranean.

Ancient Greek Food - Olives

George Christodoulou

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