What Would Happen If You Drank An Entire Bottle Of Olive Oil?
It's safe to say that we all know how to use olive oil. Maybe you like to cook with it. Maybe you like to make salad dressing with it. Maybe you just buy a nice loaf of bread, pour some olive oil into a dish, sprinkle some salt and grind some pepper over it and consider yourself a pretty cultured person with good taste.1
But have you ever just looked at a bottle of that pale green liquid and thought about taking a nice big swig? Here it is, that nice bottle of slightly-expensive oil. How luxurious would it be to just chug some?
Within the past two decades, olive oil has drizzled its way into the American pantry. According to the International Olive Council, a global organization that monitors and advocates for olive producers, between 1997 and 2017 the US grew consumption of olive oil from 130,500 tons to 315,000 tons. The bump in consumption hasn't gone unnoticed by US farmers. A recent Bloomberg feature highlighted a handful of California olive growers looking to loosen the Mediterranean's grasp on the US olive oil market.
This is all well and good for Big Olive Oil, but let's focus on you chugging an entire bottle of the stuff. What might happen?
First, we need to make some assumptions. Let's assume you are a modest user of olive oil. You probably have a modest, 16-ounce bottle of olive oil hanging out in your kitchen. Let's also assume that, thanks to popular food personalities like Rachael Ray, it's a bottle of extra virgin olive oil — the highest grade of olive oil in existence.
Depending on your ability to ingest semi-viscous liquid and your taste for olive oil, the actual process of drinking the bottle should range somewhere between "it's fine" and "yeah, it wasn't bad." In short: drinking the entire bottle should be fairly doable. If it's not then, well, I have to question your dedication to drinking an entire bottle of olive oil here, friend.
So you've gulped down the bottle down to the last drop. Great job. Now what the heck did you just put into your body? Well, olive oil, like all foods, contains calories. According to the USDA, a single tablespoon of America's rising cooking oil contains 119 calories. Some simple math reveals that you just consumed over 3,800 calories worth of cooking oil. Again, great job.
Now, is that bad? Well, if you are Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, a man who needs needs to consume over 5,000 calories a day to put on muscle, then chugging a moderately sized bottle of olive oil in a single day is maybe a misguided, but probably OK thing to do.
If you are a regular person — whom the USDA estimates that you require somewhere between 1,500 to 3,000 calories a day depending on your age, gender and activity level — then you just consumed far more calories than you could possibly need in a single day, all in one sitting. As you might already know, any calories your body does not burn it will later store as fat. Kudos to you.
Olive oil is, after all, a cooking fat. Which is fine. Fats are generally fine. Your body needs fats. And olive oil has the fats your body craves. It has mostly "good fats" (polyunsaturated and monounsaturated), but it also has "bad" fats (saturated). The government — that is, the USDA — recommends that you consume somewhere between 47 to 95 grams of fat per day. The bottle of olive oil you just downed contains 448 grams of fat. That is too much fat for single serving, much less a single day, much less a single week. It's so much fat that Vasanti Malik, a research scientist at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health, suspects that you might run into digestive issues.
So let's recap: guzzling down a bottle of olive oil will most certainly leave you feeling full, fatter and there's a chance you might poop yourself or puke. Not good!
When consumed as prescribed, though, olive oil is actually good. "There are a number of cardiometabolic health benefits associated with consumption of olive oil," writes Malik in an email. "There is consensus on benefits of olive oil on reducing risk of cardiovascular disease."
A study published in 2017 — which pulled data from a larger five-year study on the Mediterranean diet — found that adults who consumed four tablespoons of olive oil daily were able to reduce their amounts of LDL cholesterol (that's the bad kind), while increasing the function of HDL cholesterol (the good kind) slightly.
Obviously, drinking a whole bottle wouldn't encourage, and might even negate, any sort of chronic health benefits from regular consumption of olive oil. But, in terms of things to cram into your body, you could probably do a lot worse. Bottoms up!
