Olive oil with a kick seeks to energize Cypriot soccer players

Seaweed pods containing idiosyncratic doses of olive lipid with precocious polyphenol content, produced successful Cyprus and exported globally. [Yiannis Kourtoglou/Reuters]

Soccer players are lining up for a fiery footwear – not connected the pitch, but successful the signifier of a searing changeable of olive lipid from Cyprus.

The peppery, throat-burning liquid is portion of a show gyration driven by a small works successful Cyprus that produces early-harvest olive lipid packed with inflammation-busting polyphenols.

Soccer players taking the changeable are convinced it helps them retrieve faster and play harder, says olive lipid shaper Nick Schizas, who used to beryllium a FIFA-licensed cause representing soccer players from crossed the world.

“They were coming backmost with overmuch much energy. They were recovering quicker betwixt their games, betwixt their training and without maine pushing them they were coming backmost asking for more,” Schizas said of his aged beingness successful soccer.

He has teamed up with soil technologist Nicolas Netien to start a small concern selling lipid pods under the Oleaphen brand. They supply sportspeople including soccer players successful England’s prestigious Premier League and a cycling team participating successful the Tour de France.

The anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits travel from picking the olives earlier they are ripe, when they still incorporate precocious levels of polyphenols.

Netien and Schizas are producing such oils astatine an absorbing time. Researchers from two Cypriot universities will this year motorboat objective studies connected the show of Cypriot soccer players taking doses of precocious phenolic olive oil, hoping to adhd to a increasing assemblage of grounds connected its wellness potential.

They will besides measurement the benefits to gut microbiome.

At an olive mill successful the Larnaca district, Netien, who says that helium has produced lipid with the highest recorded polyphenol content, intimately follows the extraction process.

Churning produces a polyphenol called Oleocanthal, which helium calls “the astir natural, almighty anti-inflammatory successful the world”.

This aboriginal harvest lipid contains 30 times much polyphenols than other virgin olive oil, and 100 times much Oleocanthal. To support those compounds intact, Oleaphen uses single-dose seaweed-based pods alternatively of bottles, preventing oxidation and waste.

Netien says what they are doing is simply a modern revival of an aged practice.

“There’s a tradition successful the Mediterranean, particularly successful Greece and Cyprus, of doing some olive lipid truly aboriginal successful the play … and this lipid was kept astatine location to beryllium used arsenic a medicine,” helium said.

“It’s not new. It’s thousands of years old.” [Reuters]