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LIVE BETTER FEEL BETTER - EPISODE 5 - OLIVES: HEALTH BENEFITS

TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH

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Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of “Live Better Feel Better”. Today I am going to talk about olives and the health benefits of olives. Here is a small olive tree, which is in fact only a plant and has yet to grow bigger to be called an olive tree. What you are seeing now are a couple of tiny raw olive fruits. At this stage they resemble the neem fruit in appearance. These olive fruits will grow bigger in size than the neem fruits, but they are also very bitter to taste, just like the neem. Olives have excellent health benefits as well. There are different varieties of olives – some are green in colour, some are purplish black, and they look like Jamun fruits. The purplish black variety is called Kalamata olives which are more fleshy and have small seeds, so they are more popular. Olives can be made into pickles. Some people prepare olive-pickles by first soaking olives in water, and then throw away the bitter water and make pickles of the olives that remain after the water is taken away. However, I do not use this method of making olive pickles. What I do is to first put olives in a jar, and then put some rock salt on top on the olives. After some time the rock salt melts and the salt water penetrates all the olives in the jar. Olives are high in fibre content and they have a good deal of iron and copper content too, which make them very beneficial for our health. Hence we can include plenty of olives in our food, and we can use olive oil as well. By using olive oil for cooking, we can get the benefit of the “good fats” that olive oil contains. Olive oil contains a lot of mono-unsaturated fats, which help the body in removing the bad fats. Hence olive oil is an excellent cooking medium. In countries and cultures where plenty of olives and olive oil are used in the daily food and cooking, the incidents of heart disease are much lower. The older generation of Chinese people used to make a decoction of olives and olive-leaves. This decoction was taken as a soup that provided a good relief for sore throat and cold. Nowadays, olive leaf extract is made into capsules that can be taken to ward off cold and cough. Here is another amazing fact. Our neighbour, who is of a Greek origin and whose age is now 60, looks quite healthy and much younger. When I asked her what is the secret behind her youthful and healthy appearance, she told me that she takes one teaspoonful of olive oil the first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. She said that this olive oil provides protection to the inner lining of the digestive system just like a helmet provides protection to the head of a bike rider. She also said that she uses olives in many other food preparations, and this is how she maintains her youthful looks and appearance, because the nutrition of olives helps prevent obesity and many other health disorders as well. The secret is that olives are very good antioxidants. Olive oil is a very good skin tonic and can be applied on the body for massage, nutrition and cosmetic looks as well. If you would like to know more about the health benefits of olives and olive oil, you may visit our website www.rajathifamilykitchen.com . Until we meet again in our next episode of “Live Better Feel Better” I wish you goodbye and thank you for your interest.