Scientists are backing olive oil. Cyprus is ignoring its best health export

By Nicolas Netien On July 2 and 3, growers, millers, doctors and researchers from across the olive world met in Lisbon for the second Olive Oil World Congress. The two days produced a short document with an ambitious set of requests. The Lisbon Manifesto, now endorsed by more than 60 organisations in 18 countries, asks governments to treat extra virgin olive oil as a public health resource. It wants quantified intake recommendations in national dietary guidelines, olive oil in hospital kitchens and school canteens and polyphenol content printed on the bottle. The Congress will take the text to the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the Pan American Health Organisation, and ask them to recognise extra virgin olive oil as a functional food of global public health importance. Each signatory has also committed to presenting it to its own government. Cyprus appears on the signatory list once, represented by Oleaphen, the olive oil company I co-founded. I hope it will not remain the country’s only voice in support of the declaration. What the scientists are saying The case starts with PREDIMED, the largest clinical trial ever run on the Mediterranean diet and heart health. Among 7,447 people at high cardiovascular risk, those given extra virgin olive oil had 31 per cent fewer heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths than a control group on a low-fat diet. The signatories call it the strongest basis available for making extra virgin olive oil the main fat in a heart-protective diet. What sets the manifesto apart from the usual praise of the Mediterranean diet is where it places the credit. Not in the fat, but in the polyphenols. The trials agree. In the European EUROLIVE study, 200 men took three olive oils identical in every respect except their polyphenol content. Their HDL cholesterol rose, and oxidative damage to their blood fats fell, in direct proportion to the polyphenols. Same oil, same fat, different result. The brain research is where the case becomes hard to ignore. Cyprus will never compete on tonnage against Spain, Italy or Greece. Cypriot output is counted in thousands of tonnes, and the last harvest was poor – around a fifth of a normal year A Harvard team that followed 92,383 American adults for 28 years found that people consuming at least seven grams of olive oil a day, about half a tablespoon, had a 28 per cent lower risk of dying from dementia, even after accounting for the main genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s. At Auburn University, people with mild cognitive impairment were given either a polyphenol-rich oil or a refined oil with the polyphenols removed. After six months, only the polyphenol-rich group showed a tighter blood-brain barrier on MRI. The manifesto, drawing on work presented in Jaen in June with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, calls brain health a new research frontier. Oleocanthal runs through much of this. It is the compound that catches the back of the throat in a fresh, bitter oil, and it acts on the same inflammatory pathways as ibuprofen. In a 2024 trial in people with type 2 diabetes, an oleocanthal-rich oil taken with a meal reduced platelet reactivity by a margin comparable to 400 mg of ibuprofen. The signatories also cite research linking extra virgin olive oil to lower rates of breast, colorectal and prostate cancer, and to better blood sugar control at a time when more than 500 million people live with diabetes. Some of this work is still early, and the scientists say so. But the pattern is consistent: the benefit follows the polyphenols. Yet the EU grading rules for extra virgin olive oil never require anyone to measure them. A product can be perfectly legal extra virgin and carry a fraction of what these trials used, and the shopper has no way to tell. Why Cypriot oil tests so high Polyphenols are part of the olive tree’s defence chemistry, and how much ends up in the oil depends on the tree’s genetics, the place it grows, and how the fruit is harvested and milled. Trees that must fight for water, and fruit picked while still green, give the richest oils. Cyprus sits at the far end of both. Our climate, our natural environment and the genetics of the trees growing here come together in a way few places match, and Cypriot oils consistently test among the highest in polyphenols anywhere in the world. A Cypriot harvest in 2018 set the world record for polyphenol concentration, a record that still stands. The same water scarcity that drains our reservoirs, in the EU country with the highest water exploitation index, is concentrating the chemistry in our olives. A small producer that cannot win on volume Cyprus will never compete on tonnage against Spain, Italy or Greece. Cypriot output is counted in thousands of tonnes, and the last harvest was poor. Growers told Politis in November that yields were around a fifth of a normal year. At the same time, retail olive oil prices on the island were falling, held down by cheaper imports, and the consumer price index for olive oil was about 30 per cent lower in October 2025 than a year earlier. That is the trap. A Cypriot farmer whose oil carries several times the polyphenol content of an imported blend is paid as though the two were interchangeable, because on a supermarket shelf they are. High-phenolic olive oil is a niche. It is also a niche Cyprus already leads, whether or not anyone here has noticed. Oleaphen is the leading company in the category, with independently verified polyphenol levels among the highest on the market. It is also the only one running a full protocol, from harvest to delivery, to protect those phenols so they reach the consumer instead of being lost along the way. What a label would change The manifesto asks for standardised analytical methods and for polyphenol information on labels. Cyprus would gain more from both than most countries, but they have to come in that order. At present, different laboratory methods can return very different totals for the same oil. Without an agreed method, a polyphenol figure on a label is closer to advertising than to information. Time matters as well. Polyphenols break down with heat, light and oxygen from the day the oil leaves the mill. A figure measured at harvest says little about a bottle that has spent eight months in a warm warehouse. A label worth trusting would state the method, the date of analysis and the harvest year. This is the problem we built Oleaphen around. Our oil is sealed without oxygen in single-dose tubes and kept in a cold chain from the mill to the customer’s door, because a polyphenol figure only matters if the compounds are still there when the oil is taken. What the government could do The agriculture ministry and the health ministry could sign the manifesto themselves. A signature costs nothing and puts Cyprus on record next to the scientists. The bigger opportunity is in Brussels. Cyprus has a seat at the table on food labelling, and it has a direct interest in two changes the manifesto supports: mandatory, standardised polyphenol information on olive oil labels, and new authorised health claims that reflect the research on compounds such as oleocanthal, which currently has none. Larger producing countries have little reason to push for rules that reward concentration over volume. Cyprus does. At home, the knowledge already exists to raise phenolic content in almost any grove. Harvest date, fruit handling, milling temperature, malaxation time and oxygen exposure all move the final number, often by hundreds of milligrams per kilo. Many small mills and growers have neither the equipment nor the training to control them. Targeted grants for modern milling equipment, paired with practical training for growers and mill operators, would lift the quality of the whole island’s production within a few seasons. The State General Laboratory and the Agricultural Research Institute could back this with a yearly public survey of Cypriot oils, by harvest and by district, using the IOC reference method. That data would give Cyprus something to say abroad. Our tourism and export bodies promote halloumi and commandaria by name. High-phenolic olive oil deserves the same treatment, and it could be protected the same way, with an origin designation built around measured phenolic content rather than a generic island label. Around that sits an entire business ecosystem: accredited testing laboratories, specialist mills, bottling and cold storage, research partnerships with universities, grove visits for the growing number of visitors who care about what they eat. Each of these creates skilled rural jobs, and each depends on Cyprus deciding that its olive oil is a premium product with the numbers to prove it. The health ministry, meanwhile, could add a quantified olive oil recommendation to national dietary guidance, and public kitchens in schools and hospitals could specify extra virgin oil with a minimum measured polyphenol content. People on this island were gathering olives in the Neolithic and growing them since the Bronze Age. We know how to produce the oil. What we have never done, as a country, is count what is in it. Nicolas Netien is an environmental engineer, specialising in agroecology and permaculture design, based in Cyprus. He is co-founder and chief scientist of Oleaphen, a Cypriot producer of ultra-high polyphenol extra virgin olive oil, sealed oxygen-free in single-dose tubes and delivered through a cold chain