Is the goodness of extra virgin olive oil over rated / over promoted?

Don't think so. Looking at the number of reports and papers concerning Extra Virgin Olive Oil - the goodness definitely outweighs the small portion of bad press on it... but this is just my opinion...

I love olive oil, and I have seen it's benefits working in my life many different ways. Sometimes through ingestion, and sometimes it's medicinal or topical. Regardless, I am a 35 yr old chef and survivor of a massive heart attack and triple bypass surgery.

I have seen the impact that using olive oil as part of a lower fat diet can have. I agree that in cultures whose diets have plant based oils/fats have a totally different scenerio than most american fast-food based diets. If you are using the olive oil for deep frying foods like skin on chicken or adding to sausage lasagna on a daily basis, you might as well go ahead and schedule an angioplasty as well.

However, if used correctly with wholesome foods as part of a healthier low fat diet, I believe that olive oil has huge amounts of health benefits we have yet to discover! I agree it's not the oil itself that makes you gain, it's what you eat with it, like foods high in sugars and trigylcerides and the portion sizes that make you gain or lose weight. Anyway, enjoy it as you see fit... :).

The Arab's use tons of olive oil in they're dishes! Its a part of the mediterranean diet. Fat doesn't make you fat.

That's a myth that's running around. Sugar makes you fat.

Many claims and studies have been done about olive oil and its health benefits. I've never actually read the studies proving its benefits and chances are neither have you. In my opinion you could get 100 times more nutritional use out of one can of black beans, a can of tuna, and a container of Redskin Spanish Peanuts, than for what nutritional use and money you'll ever get in 1 cup of olive oil, much less the bottle.

Olive oil in our cooking as we know it is a con, plain and simple! At best, it’s a novelty. A concept that's even easier to grasp here if you don’t believe me - picture your overweight relative that uses olive oil to cook pan fried chicken with the skin on or includes it in their pan of sausage lasagna!

People use gobs of it in their food. That's not healthy.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.