Olive Oil: Secrets of High Polyphenol, Award-Winning Quality

The Moss Report is brought to you by Mycolife, makers of the world's best mushroom extracts, including the Moss Method Mushroom Formula, available exclusively at mycolife.us. Hello, healers. My name is Ben, and this is The Moss Report. I'm here today with my father, author and founder of The Moss Report, Dr. Ralph W. Moss, and we're joined with our special guest.

Richard Meisler from the San Miguel Olive Farm out in San Miguel, California, just about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Gentlemen, nice to see you both. Richard, thank you so much for joining us today. It's my pleasure. I'm just ready to get started. I'm so glad that you joined us because you know more about the questions of what makes an olive oil a quality olive oil than anybody else I've ever spoken to.

And we had a chance to talk a little bit the other day, but I'm hoping we can recap that and bring my father into the conversation. And for the benefit of our audience, maybe learn a few things about what you know and what you've learned along the way. Why don't we start, first of all, if you would, just tell us a little bit about yourself and your farm, and then we can talk about the oil. Okay. We started farming in 2005.

And we planted 1,200 trees, and they're Tuscan varietals. We produce a very high polyphenol olive oil. We actually have six oils. It's an oil that tastes different. The high polyphenol oils don't appeal to everyone. because they don't understand the oil or the qualities of the oil. So we win some, we lose some. And basically, over the years, we won.

We have a nice clientele, and the clientele is looking for high polyphenol olive oils because they understand the product. Most people will never investigate the product. And they won't know, but they buy the olive oil and they say, well, we have olive oil today. That's fine. But when you take the time to understand the product.

You will never use another oil again once you use a high polyphenol oil. It's delicious even in your cooking, but our oils are a little pricey because we do things differently. Before I went into farming, I was a musician. I was a band leader in Long Island and in California. And migrating from the music industry to farming was only by a suggestion from my wife's family, who are the original date farmers in Thermal, California.

Okay. Out at Gates. And they said, you know, you should plant some trees on your property. And that's how we got started. The most important thing for us was that we... We learned hands on. We knew nothing about farming, absolutely nothing. By playing in the dirt. and going to meetings and reading and talking and meeting with people that had experienced a lot of, you know, a lot of good stuff.

We followed some of their advice, and it sounded good to us, and we did it. My wife, Myrna, is a great help. She and I worked our tails off to make sure that we do things as right as possible. We did a hands-on experience that worked out really good. The information that I can give you today...

will be very, very, very important because it's simple. It's simple information that people just bypass. Well, here it goes. It starts from the tree to the mill. Number one, we harvest early. Early harvest gives us unripe olives. Unripe olives are loaded with polyphenols. They're strong. It's like a young kid running around the house. You can't stop them. They're full of energy. The olives are filled with energy when they're young. We look for...

The color of the olive, which is green on the outside, creamy green on the inside. With a little bit of red under the skin, where I believe the polyphenols come from that particular area. The olives are smaller, so it takes twice as many olives. to make a bottle of power oil. We harvest by hand. We don't use sticks to... knock the olives off the trees, or rakes where they rake the olives down off the trees and then they fall on the tarp. An olive is a fruit. It's like a little baby.

And when you treat it right, it's going to treat you right. Meaning that if you harvest olives and shake them off a tree and they fall 20 feet on the ground, it's like you're not going to see them. the dent in the olive because it's an olive. And you can't look at every little olive. So you have to assume that the olives are going to be damaged when I get a 15, 20-foot fall.

And what happens there is they start to oxidize. The people that are harvesting off the tree, they're not looking at their feet. they're looking at where the olives are up on the tree. And the problem with that is they walk on the olives that they just knocked off the tree that were just perfectly beautiful olives.

but they step on them because they're not looking where they're walking. They're looking at the tree to where the next group of olives would be. So from the very first minute that olive comes off the tree, They'd be fortunate if they don't step on them, but they do step on them. And it doesn't mean anything, apparently, to probably maybe 90% or 95% of the growers.

The small grower will rake them off the tree by hand. If you take an apple and you open the apple and you let it sit on the table for 20 minutes to turn brown, the same thing happens with an olive. So if you step on it, you're cracking the olive. You crack the olive, it starts to turn rancid right away before it even gets to the mill. Quality olives are handled by hand, generally speaking. Quality oil comes from quality olives. And the way we do this is by hand.

Everything is harvested by hand, goes into a bucket. Nothing goes on the ground. Whatever goes on the ground, we leave for the birds and the bugs and the gophers. We then take... By the way, the buckets and everything that we use are clean. We power wash everything. We use no detergents. But, you know, we want to really start right and end up right. You can't skip a step.

Once it's all over, it doesn't give you the quality that you want. Is it fair to say you're also not using pesticides or any other chemical agents? Right. Okay. We don't spray for the weeds. I try very hard to do everything organically, but the problem is it's not a problem, but we're not certified organic. But for me, it's okay because we change the word from organic to natural. We farm naturally. Understood. We harvest the olives by hand.

When the buckets, these picking buckets that the harvest people have are filled, they pour that bucket into a tray. We come along and pick up the tray of olives. and then bring it to a big bin, which holds 800 pounds of olives. The bins are cleaned as well. So it's clean, clean, clean, nothing on the floor, no cracked olives. So the olives are going basically from the tree into the big bin. The big bin, we have...

One person on one side pouring crushed ice into the bin, keeping the olives cold. Very cold. We power wash our olives as they're being poured into the bin. The ice keeps the water cold, keeps the olives cold, slows the oxidation down. We take all the dust off the olives from the farm. We have no cracked olives. We just power wash them, ice them, keep them cold, and they go to the mill within three hours. Wow.

In other words, they're harvested two and a half hours, and then the bin is full, off to the mill. We take three at a time. And we keep this going until we finish our harvest. In order for me to get a totally clean picture from the tree to the mill, hand harvested, clean buckets, clean bins, no broken olives, we have a... ice, we have power washing, go to the mill, get washed again, and the machine is clean.

The machine is cold press for us. No heat whatsoever. Heat will break the olive oil down just a little as it's being milled. We don't break the oil down. We want to have the oil like it was made thousands of years ago. We have two types of oil. Number one, we have a filtered oil, which is the mainstay. We have one unfiltered oil, which has sediment in it. That oil is called oleo new ovo. That is an oil that will contain sediment, and it's got a very high phenol count.

The sediment in the oil shortens the life of the oil. Sediment turns the oil rancid after a period of time. But the way we... harvest and mill and handle the chemistry is very very strong very good so we have very strong chemistry from the beginning And we filter. That's the majority of our oil. And that gives us a pure oil. but very high polyphenols, meaning very high polyphenols from 600 to almost 800 in a count. I sent you the labels.

So if you read the back of the label, this is what we do. Years ago, we put our label, the top part of that label on the bottle. Normally, there was no top part of that label. There was just a nutrient label. And that's what all the other 98% of the people have, just nutrient label. So we give you a good quality oil, very high in polyphenols, handled right from the tree to the middle.

And then we bottle as soon as we can. We don't store our oil in that. I don't want to take a chance with that. So what we do is we take the oil. Bottle it as soon as we can. But before we bottle, we take a chemistry. The chemistry right out of the mill, and then a chemistry when we blend our olive oil. We have five varietals and we blend our oil. We take another chemistry. So our oils have double chemistry. One from the mill.

and one right before we bottle. And that's what goes on the label, the one right before we bottle. So this is a process that most people either do or they won't do.

And it's costly. The trees, most of the people that we have harvesting are Hispanic. And they are field workers. And they're used to working. I don't know how to explain it to you, but there's a work ethic built into these people. That is unreal. It's just incredible. If you see people picking strawberries and things like that, hunched over for six, seven hours a day, you have to better believe that they go home tired.

We pay well. We always have a crew. We treat the people that harvest as a human being, not just a slave or a worker. And that's very important to us. So it completes the picture for us. But in order to get the work done, we keep our trees short. Our trees are six, seven feet high. So these people can take a branch and bend the branch and scoop the olives right off the branch. So it makes it comfortable for them to harvest our trees.

One of the most important things is that they get as much as they can off the tree. It's like you look at something and you don't see it because there are lots of green. Leaves are green. Very hard. To harvest the olives off a tree when the leaves are green, you can't see them. So some olives are left on the tree. Those olives, we have scavengers, people come.

after the harvest, and we tell them to go through the trees and harvest whatever you like. If you leave your olives on the tree, they get hard and stay there, and they hang on the tree. It's called the mummy. We call them mummies, little bad olives that have hardened, and they don't leave the tree. So on the next harvest, those olives get involved with the new harvest. And you don't want those in your new harvest. So we have a special crew that comes in and prunes the trees and then...

They see if they have anything. They make sure that it's not there. We want the purest possible oil you can get. And that's what preserves the polyphenols. The longer the olive stays on the tree, mind you, from green to dark black on the outside and red on the inside is ripe. the less healthful the olive oil becomes. Interesting. The reason water is sucked up into the olive as it grows.

we have uh no water we we've been dry farming for three years now uh we had a big problem this year we probably will not have any oil this year we're checking our trees i'm going crazy We had a very, very strong wind and it dried the flowers, the buds, everything. So we were checking our trees for sure. And the olives are very, very small. They might not grow.

So we're not sure if we have any oil at all this year. But you know what? The past years have been beautiful for us. And we look forward to the next year. So. When you have olives that stay on the tree to the ripe portion, water is sucked into the olive. and dissolves the water phenols in the olive. That could affect your aroma. That could affect a lot of things, some of the chemistry that's in the oil.

It's a process that you have to be in that business to understand how to get the most out of your product without using chemicals and unnatural chemicals. Everything that comes off the tree goes back in the ground. The leaves are very, very good for the ground. The leaves are very good for your olive oil. That's what gives you the bitterness and texture and flavor.

We make a very fine oil. It's like a jeweler's oil. You put your finger in the oil, just rub it on the back of your hand and just rub it in just a little bit and blow on it. It goes away. There's nothing there. It's very, very low in fat. Very, very healthy. Great for your heart, for your body. The longer the olive stays on the tree, the more fat in the oil. Okay. The short early harvest, less fat because there's less meat on the olive. So this is what we want, less meat.

less water, and the phenols stay high. The minute you have ripe olives, the quality of the oil has to go down because the phenol level goes down.

Okay. Imported olive oil. People that buy imported oil, they say import it from Italy or Greece or wherever. Greece is probably a better bet than Italy sometimes. But, you know, they have a different chemistry. In order to have extra virgin olive oil chemistry in the United States, the federal government sets a parameter. California Olive Oil Council sets a parameter. The people in California abide by the California Olive Oil Council. Just two examples.

Free fatty acid. Very, very important to olive oil. When you buy an imported oil, sometimes on the front label, the label would say, 0.8 acid or less than 0.8 acid. So that is the top acceptable number. Anything beyond that. It's not extra virgin olive oil. I see. In California, it'll say 0.5. Those are the two acceptable highest free fatty acids. So is that the defining characteristic of extra virgin is the fatty acid content? The chemistry for extra virgin olive oil. Okay. The certification.

will not certify if it's over 0.8 or 0.5. The free fatty acid in our oil. We had oils this past year with 0.00, 0.02, 0.03, 0.05, 0.07. Very, very low. What that does is sort of gives you a real insight to what that oil is going to be like. That's the first chemistry, free fatty acid or acid, as they call it from. Okay. The second one is the peroxide value. The peroxide value is the rancidity of the oil before it goes into the bottle.

or whenever they take the chemistry of that oil. Imported number, 20. California, 15. Ours is six. Five, four. Seven is high for us. So we have four, five, six, seven in that range. So that's low.

And that's rancidity. So low rancidity, very, very low free fatty acid are the two crucial chemistries in that oil. When you get a bottle of olive oil, you turn the bottle around. Generally, there's nothing there except a nutrient label and a pretty story where the oil comes from.

When you look at the front label, it says this oil may contain, in tiny print, like a car commercial, you can't read, you just can't read it, you know. And it says this oil may come from, and they list all these different countries. or this oil may contain 20% inert oils. So when you read labels, you must read the front and the back.

In order to get a good quality oil, you have to follow a procedure. The procedure has to be very definite. And we're passionate about what we do. So these are the things that people. Do not understand. If I were a customer and I go to an olive oil store, I knew nothing about olive oil. There were three choices that you have to make. Number one. Oh, that's a pretty bottle. Oh, check. That label is really good. Let me see. Yeah. Wow, that's a nice label, a nice bottle. Then you look at the price.

Oh, the price is really good. No problem. They buy it on either the bottle, the label, or the price. They can't taste it. So if you can't taste it, you know, you're at the mercy of two words, extra virgin. So extra virgin olive oil for those people that want to say, well, how do I know the quality in the bottle? How do I? Well, I guess it's a pretty bottle. They probably have good oil. No. The prettier the bottle, the lower the quality of the oil. That's possible. Okay. So.

Overall, what happens is people buy either because they're busy shopping, they just need olive oil, they grab a bottle of oil, put it in the cart and split. And if that's... What happens, that's what happens. They don't smell it when they get home. They open the bottle. They use it and put it on the table. We need a dark bottle. No plastic. None. No plastic. Plastic has pores in it. The pores absorb oil. They'll absorb anything in the bottle. Dark colored bottle.

protects the oil from the UV. When people come out with a product and they show it to you in a plastic bottle, it's strange, but you know. They could squeeze the bottle, get olive oil. That's wonderful. But they don't know what's happening inside. And plastic is not – it has a – There's something that you really don't want. You open the bottle, smells like plastic, doesn't smell like oil. We never used to put a slow pour in the bottle.

But people need that because, you know, without a slow pour, sometimes they put too much oil on. So we said, okay, we're going to put a slow pour in the bottle, the old little plastic thing. And the rest of the bottle is dark and green. The quality of the bottle is very important, too. If you buy a real cheap bottle, you might have a lot of lead in it.

We try to buy the best bottles we can. The storage, very important. The best temperature for olive oil for us, we stay minimum 56 degrees. You can put in a wine cooler and it stays beautiful. If you're not using a lot of oil, if you buy a lot of oil and it's good oil, you want to put it in a wine cooler. Smoke point. Where does the smoke come from? In the oil. Rancidity. Where does it come from?

Fat in the oil. So you have fat, you have smoke point. That's why olive oil smokes. The oils are not good quality oils. They have too much fat in them. So I tell some of the people that come, we have a tasting room at our farm. And I show them, if you take a bottle of olive oil and you just hold it lengthwise and you look at the...

You make it like a level, and you can see the bubble in the oil. So you go this way, that way, you watch the bubble. And if it's a really slow bubble and it doesn't move too fast, you have too much fat in the oil. There are so many different things that people need to understand, and this is why I'm giving you snippets of stuff. The fat in the oil is what turns your oil rancid. Heat turns your oil rancid. Light turns your oil rancid.

If you shop for a good oil, you must read the label. It should have as much information as possible. Well, I want to just also mention that... On your website, you list all of the awards that your product has won. So apparently, this quality control that you have not only enhances the...

chemistry as you've described it, but it must be a delicious tasting oil. You're completely sold out of your product and we're pre-ordering for November. I'm going to put my order in. We will know by August and then the people that pre-bought. If by chance we don't have enough to fill their orders, we'll just do a refund for them. This is what only happened once before where we had no oil.

The winds have been fierce up here in San Miguel. They haven't stopped. Today was the first day that I woke up and the trees were not moving. Nothing was moving. Dead, no wind. The other days are hours and hours constant. Dried up my flowers, dried up the buds, and doing a dry farming doesn't help. But the dry farming... gives us less water in the olive, and it takes only what it needs to grow. It's not an overabundance of water. So people that have olive trees...

make a huge mistake. They water them every week and you don't water an olive tree every week. They are not that type of a tree. Polyphenols, that's what gives you the collage of taste. The more phenols, the more collage of taste you get. You get the nuttiness. You get the fruitiness. You get the aroma. You get the peppery finish. And what? What is the peppery finish? Those are your antioxidants in the oil.

That is what gets washed out in the store-bought oil for everyone. When they do that, they just wash out the oil. They add water to the mash. takes the phenols down. But a little hint for the people that are using a high polyphenol oil, a little couple of grains of salt and that smooths out your oil. And it's unpalatable for these people that have a problem with the pepper. But with the chemistry, you're looking at the purity and you're looking at...

the quality of rancidity. You're looking at the total rancidity and your peroxide value at the time of bottling and then the free fatty acid. If you're able to see that on a bottle and it says like .02, .03, .05, that is telling you the longevity of the oil. So that's how these chemistries work, and that's what they are. You can't really have one chemistry that is really good and the rest not so good. It has to be the total.

The total package. And that's why we have that on our bottles. That's the total package. Those five chemistries. And the phenols are broken down in a different way. That's why they're separated.

Dad, have you got any questions for Richard? I have a couple, yeah. Listening to you, Richard, reminds me of a book that was popular when we were younger, A Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Persig. Because it's a meditation on quality. And I think you've done something really extraordinary, which is to go for the highest quality humanly possible in this. extremely important area, which we, Ben and I, and many of our viewers believe in.

But it's amazing that you really refined it to a fine art, I think. So congratulations. My frustration is, first of all, you don't have any product to... offer people now. I think if you did, a lot of people would be convinced that they wanted to buy it. The other thing is that the price, as I saw it on your website, is very high, and I'm not faulting you. I mean, I understand quality takes time, effort, money, and so forth. So in no way is that a criticism. It's just a fact of life.

And also, even though we've been advocating for high polyphenol olive oils for a couple of years, I'm just wondering what practical guidance could you give to our viewers in terms of... going into a well-stocked grocery and buying something that would at least approximate a healthy product for them? Okay. That's a real good question. I love it. All right, here we go. When people purchase our product, they are not buying a cooking oil. They are buying a drizzle oil.

A garnishing oil or healthful oil that they could take in the morning, that is the oil that they should be taking for health reasons. People that go to the store and buy olive oil. They have to read the label. If there's any possibility of seeing like any sort of chemistry on the bottle, that will help. But they don't understand the chemistry. It took 30 years for the wine industry in California to be what it is today, which is it's like a superpower.

The same thing is going to happen with olive oil. So if you go to the store, how can you – this is the question. How can you – Tell the person which kind of oil it is when there's no information on the bottle. So you have to sell it. Like if you go to the store and you buy your olive oil in the store. Which oil do you know is the best oil to buy? You don't. That's the problem. And this is where I...

try to research how to get out of that problem. And the only way to do it is to have the chemistry on the bottle. The oils in the store are cooking oils. They are not... They're an everyday cooking oil. They are not of high quality oil. They can't be for that price. It costs so much money to farm today. that if you want to have a very pure oil, you have to make sure it's pure. And where do the olives go from the tree? They go into a bucket instead of on the floor. And you want pure.

Olive oil, clean olive oil, olive oil that is fresh and smells fresh. And that's what we do. So going to the store, they're at the mercy of the store. So I would recommend. If you want to have an oil that is a high-quality oil where they want a high polyphenol oil to cook with, then it becomes quite expensive. Because the high polyphenol growers have only a specific clientele. And that clientele...

It comes from people like you and it comes from doctors that are offering that say, hey, you've got to use some olive oil in your diet and you need high polyphenol oil. That's where our oil comes in. My wife says to me, Richard, you know, Our oils are priced high. And I said they're not according to what it cost us to harvest and produce. So everything has got a thing, you know, and the mindset is.

In lesser expensive oil, how do you know what quality you buy? You don't. That's the biggest problem we have. You can't tell what's in the bottle.

People have to go by recommendation through a website that is a knowledgeable website or a one-to-one basis at my farm, at my tasting room. You know, you need to have somebody guide the people. And to guide the people, it takes time. You cannot get to everyone.

People need a product, but it's very hard to find out which is the best. If the people follow the competitions, they will find out the best oils the competitions don't always do the best high polyphenol oils so we we enter the competitions we end up with gold awards if they you know but it's telling you that We have a high polyphenol olive oil, and this is where we're at. I was telling my wife this morning, I said, you know, it takes time for people to understand our product.

And once they understand the product, they come back. We talk about the freshness, the harvest date as being a critical factor. So you need that information on your bottle. And the harvest date, sometimes they freeze olive oil. They can freeze it. If you were growing, you had a million trees and you can't get rid of all your oil in one year, you freeze it. And then as you need it, you thaw it out.

And you use it. Put a harvest date of three years on that or two years on that, it's frozen. So there's so much that goes on in the industry that people don't even think about. And it's a shame because. there's so much more to what we do. But I believe olive oil is underpriced for the quality of life that it can give someone. The people that make this type of an oil are not very many. Right. Because of the bitterness. And the bitterness is very important. There's three things that they need.

Buttery, but not too buttery. That's less fat in the oil. Bitter, because that's the freshness as well as some of the oil from the leaves of the olive tree, which are very, very healthful. And then you have the finish, the peppery finish. Those three are the attributes, the bottom line attributes of extra virgin olive oil. Richard.

I want to thank you very much for taking the time to share your story and the quality points that you work very hard to maintain in your product. I'm sure our audience is going to also appreciate. Your words of wisdom very much. You're really doing a great service to us and to our audience by helping to educate us around these topics. So thank you again. Thank you. Pleasure. Very, very interesting. For the Moss Report, I'm Ben Moss. How are you healing today?