Oleaceae
Olea europaea
Olive · Olive leaf
- Part used
- leaffruitoil
- Native range
- The Mediterranean basin; cultivated for at least six thousand years
- Morphology
- An evergreen tree to fifteen metres, extremely long-lived, with narrow grey-green leaves silvery beneath and small cream flowers, followed by the drupe.
What is in it
Evidence
Olive leaf extract shows modest blood pressure lowering in small trials. The far better-evidenced finding concerns olive oil as part of a Mediterranean dietary pattern, which is a statement about diet rather than about a herbal preparation.
Safety
Food use is benign. Leaf extract may lower blood pressure and blood glucose, which matters for anyone already treated for either.
Interactions: Additive with antihypertensives and antidiabetic drugs
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed medicine ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Central to Mediterranean food, ritual and medicine since antiquity. The leaf was used for fever and, from the nineteenth century, in the treatment of malaria in some Mediterranean practice.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Oleocanthal, the compound responsible for the peppery catch at the back of the throat in a good fresh olive oil, was identified partly because a researcher noticed the sensation was identical to the one produced by liquid ibuprofen. It turned out to act on the same enzymes, though at concentrations far below a therapeutic dose.
That is a genuine and rather elegant piece of chemistry, and it is regularly inflated into a claim that olive oil is an anti-inflammatory drug. It is not. It is a food containing a trace of a compound that shares a mechanism with one, which is a much smaller and more interesting statement.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.