A group of scientists from the Nutrition and Food Science Department from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Granada have reported the beneficial effects of extra virgin olive oil on human health, determining in vitro and in vivo the antioxidant power that the examined extra virgin olive oil samples present. With this work, researchers have found a more effective method to establish the antioxidant capacity of extra virgin olive oil.

Research has been directed by doctors M. Carmen López Martínez, Herminia López García de La Serrana and José Javier Quesada Granados, and its main author is Cristina Samaniego Sánchez. The scientists have prepared four methods that let us know know the antioxidant capacity and the beneficial effect of the extra virgin olive oil obtained from olives of the Picual variety.

In order to carry out this work, they determined the best method to calculate the in vitro antioxidant capacity in oil samples. They concluded that, among all the applied methods, the ABTS was the most suitable in order to study this kind of samples as it shows the correlation with the total polyphenol index in a better way.

Moreover, scientists observed that the reproducibility of the results of these methods is good and that the variation coefficients obtained by the different methods are acceptable, which makes it possible to conclude, generally, that the four studied methods could be applied to measure the antioxidant oil capacity.

Scientists from Granada are not discarding the idea of registering some patents related to this research soon, since they already have experience in getting patents related to other studies on food, such as alcoholic drinks. Their research is applicable to every kind of olive oil, and these methods could be used in the areas where olive groves are cultivated, regardless of the variety of olive used in the oil obtaining process.

The results of this research have been published in the "Journal of Nutrition", "Journal of Chromatography A", "Talanta" and "Analytica Chimica Acta" international journals.