Olive Oil and Health in Roman Antiquity

Olive oil’s importance to ancient Mediterranean peoples suggests their suitability for examining its health effects. Desirable for this investigation is knowledge of how much olive oil they consumed. Such data might seem irretrievable, but in On Agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato the Elder advised that each slave receive about 6.8 liters (1.8 gallons) yearly.¹¹² Skeptics might challenge this information given the impossibility of knowing whether readers followed this advice during or after Cato’s life. Additionally, the dietary diversity emphasized in the previous section means that Mediterranean peoples consumed different quantities of olive oil, if any. Moreover, his recommendation may reveal nothing about consumption before or after his time.

This section acknowledges these criticisms while arguing that three conditions favor On Agriculture’s use as an index of olive oil consumption. First, Rome, like elsewhere in premodern times, was agrarian. The estimate that Rome’s farms generally yielded 10 percent surpluses means that agriculture fed farmers plus an extra one-tenth of people: those engaged outside agriculture, namely urbanites."³ The 90 percent of Romans who lived and worked on farms were within Cato’s purview because he specified rations for rural rather than urban laborers.

Second, in targeting farmworkers (slaves), his allowances applied to the masses rather than elites. Such information is invaluable during an era when literate people came from the leisure class and seldom expressed interest in anyone but their peers. In other words, in waiting about slaves, Cato revealed information about commoners, whose diets, nutrition, and health are central to this inquiry. The objection that not all nine-tenths of Roman workers were slaves does not weaken this argument because farmworkers, whether slave or free, had to exert themselves to eke out an existence in an era of low' yields and rudimentary technology. To put the matter differently, free people and slaves faced the same biological and technological limits to extracting food from the soil. Both toiled under the same conditions.

Third, On Agriculture survives. In fact, it is the oldest extant Latin text.¹¹⁴ At a time of papyri and parchment, documents had to be copied and recopied by hand, an expensive, laborious chore that doomed anything deemed unimportant to oblivion. On Agriculture’s persistence over two millennia suggests its value to readers. Varro and Columella quoted it, and Columella praised the manual for teaching “agriculture to speak Latin.”¹¹⁵ Roman author and stylist Aulus Gellius (c. 125— c. 180 CE) admired its vigor and directness.¹¹⁶ Pliny quoted it sixty-four times in his Natural History (c. 77 CE), more than any other source.¹¹⁷ Such circumstances imply that readers heeded rather than ignored Cato.

His 6.8 liters of olive oil per slave annually is little over half Mueller’s 2012 estimate that the average Italian consumed 13 liters (3.4 gallons) per year.¹¹⁸ Cato’s smaller number is unsurprising given ancient agriculture’s low yields, mentioned already, and the desire to economize slaves’ upkeep. Frugality led Cato to recommend less food for slaves when ill and unable to work.¹¹⁹ Modern corporations seek the same parsimony even though workers are now free to sell their talents to the highest bidder.

Olive oil does not appear to have improved Roman demography. A woman who reached menopause had to average 4.5-6.5 births just to replace losses from mortality.¹²⁰ Youth mortality was so high that three or four times more people died before age ten than reached sixty.¹²¹ Contagion truncated lives, especially in cities. Although epidemics worried authorities, diseases were prevalent even in uneventful times. Ancient life expectancy at birth (e°) hovered nearer twenty than thirty years.¹²² Census data from Roman Egypt, skeletons from North African cemeteries, and the third- century CE legal document Ulpian’s life table put e° around twenty-two years.¹²³

These numbers led Austrian historian Walter Scheidel (b. 1966) to doubt that diets improved during antiquity and to infer poor net nutrition from bone and teeth deformities.¹²⁴ Net nutrition is intake minus claims made by work, diseases, and parasites. Intake adequate today might have failed to meet the demands of a precarious existence. Ancient Mediterranean diets were deficient in vitamin A and its precursors, vitamin D, and possibly iron.¹²⁵ Iron deficiency is inferred from anemia and is controversial. Because pathogens and parasites deplete iron, diets may contain enough iron by modern reckoning but still not protect against anemia. Such considerations indicate that olive oil cannot be faulted entirely for nutritional shortfalls. On the other hand, its value extending no farther than calories, phytochemicals, and vitamins E and K, olive oil cannot have prevented iron and vitamins A and D deficits. A later section quantifies olive oil’s vitamins E and K.

Amid modernity’s diverse foods, consumers can do better than olive oil. For example, Chapter 13 recommends the potato as the world’s most nourishing food. Readers should favor it over olive oil. If fatty foods are desired, peanuts—Chapter 8 discussed their origin, dispersal, consumption, nutrition, and healthfulness—supply many more nutrients than olive oil. Several nuts in Chapter 9 provide more essential fatty acids than olive oil plus abundant nutrients. These comparisons do not bar it from diets but instead urge consideration of the entire nutrient profile when selecting foods.

Olive Oil and Health in Crete

Besides ancient Rome, post-World War II Crete is a suitable example given Allbaugh’s observation, mentioned above, that Cretans ate copious olives and olive oil. The average Cretan consumed 30.5 kilograms (33.4 liters) of olive oil in 1948.¹²⁶ Mueller wrote in 2012 that the typical resident of Kritsa, Crete ingested the world’s most olive oil at 45.6 kilograms (50 liters) yearly, whereas the mean for all Greeks was 19.2 kilograms (21.1 liters) per person annually.¹²⁷ Also in 2012, Hoffman and Gerber stated that the Greek annual average was the world’s highest at 15.9 kilograms (17.4 liters) per capita.¹²⁸ Italy and Spain ranked second and third in annual intake at 14 kilograms (15.4 liters) and

• 11.8 kilograms (12.9 liters) per head, respectively. At the bottom of Mediterranean countries were Turkey and Egypt at 0.7 kilograms (700 grams or 767.2 milliliters) and 0.1 kilograms (100 grams or 109.6 milliliters) per person per year, respectively. Tunisian, Moroccan, and French annual averages were not inordinate by Greek standards at 3.4 kilograms (3.7 liters), 2.9 kilograms (3.2 liters), and
• 1.7 kilograms (1.9 liters) per capita, respectively. These numbers elude easy comparison because they vary markedly. Moreover, Muller on one hand and Hoffman and Gerber on the other disagreed about Greek consumption.

These problems may be skirted by concentrating on Allbaugh, who furnished demographic data. Whereas Mediterranean countries reported mortality between fourteen and eighteen per 1,000 persons in 1948—figures Allbaugh rated “medium high”—Crete totaled from 11.3 to 13.7 before World War II and 10.6 from 1946 to 1948.¹²⁹ In the Mediterranean, only Jews and Cypriots approached Cretan mortality, which was 2.5 years lower in countryside than city.¹³⁰ In 1948, Crete’s modal age at death was forty-eight, eight years later than in 1938. Cretan e° in 1948 was roughly fifty-five or fifty-six years. By comparison, U.S. modal age at death in 1948 was fifty-eight years and e° was sixty-seven years.

Differences between hinterland and metropolis implied that contagion truncated urban lives. Between 1946 and 1948, pneumonia was Crete’s second greatest killer, trailing the natural causes of old age.¹³¹ Tuberculosis killed under 5 percent of Cretans, and, as a group, dysentery, diarrhea, enteritis, and typhoid registered 3 percent of deaths. Reductions in malaria from the use of the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and in influenza likely explained the increase in lifespan between 1938 and 1948.

While malaria and influenza retreated, deaths from heart disease and cancers rose.¹³² These chronic diseases may have stemmed from Crete’s World War II reliance on imports rather than its traditional foods.¹³³ Imports did not cease at war’s end because in 1953, Allbaugh reported that Crete distributed sucrose, corn, and soybean flour free to its poorest citizens.¹³⁴ The ascent of heart disease and cancers implied that sucrose, corn, and soybean flour undermined health. In this context, Chapter 11 critiques sucrose, and Chapter 12 furnishes evidence of corn’s shortcomings.

Crete’s low death rate by Mediterranean standards raised the possibility that olive oil, as a large component of diets, is healthful, though, as noted, evidence from antiquity is wanting. Crete’s favorable mortality may be juxtaposed with its status as part of Greece, Europe’s poorest nation in 1948.¹³⁵ Because poverty often correlates with morbidity and mortality, as discussed in Chapter 1, Cretans were exceptional in being poor and healthy.

If Cretans in the 1940s and 1950s exemplified vitality and ate much fat, especially olive oil, readers may wish to emulate their diets. To this end, the Cretan model limits fat largely to olive oil. Allbaugh emphasized Crete’s paucity of butter and animal fat and near absence of margarine.¹³⁶ Moreover, Cretans consumed little sucrose, honey, or other sweeteners, subjects of the next chapter. Crucial is the recognition that Cretan diets necessitated deprivation. One interviewee summarized the island’s predicament, stating that “We are hungry most of the time.”¹³⁷

Despite hunger, Cretan life mandated strenuous exertions. Allbaugh recorded Cretans’ “great amount of daily walking over stony and hilly terrain.”¹³⁸ This pedestrianism and average of just two cars per 1,000 residents between 1930 and 1940 contrasted with America’s automobile addiction, a problem explored in Chapter 12 and elsewhere.¹³⁹ Eighty percent of Cretans occupied farms, which they worked without machines.¹⁴⁰ Allbaugh counted only forty tractors on the island.¹⁴¹ Instead, farmers used little besides a plow, sickle, and hoe. Plowing necessitated continuous walking. The sickle and hoe required enormous hand labor. The sickle—often used while bent near the ground— fatigued workers to a degree unknown and unimaginable in developed nations. Periods of intense labor required daily consumption of 4,500 calories per person.¹⁴²

Emulation of Cretan vitality, therefore, requires more than eating fat. Absent the arduous exertions that Allbaugh documented throughout Crete: A Case Study of an Underdeveloped Area (1953), excess fat and calories, as noted, cause overweight and obesity. The Cretan formula requires unremitting toil, self-denial, and hunger. This book doubts that developed countries are ready for such austerity and sacrifice. Among sacrifices, for example, Cretan vigor demanded the automobile’s renunciation, a step unthinkable and draconian to the affluent.

Returning to the relationship between health and wealth, a 2009 paper used data from the Great Depression’s (1929-1939) early years (1930-1933) to argue that health improves during economic crises.¹⁴³ This conclusion contradicts Chapter Ts observation that the wealthiest Americans live almost fifteen years longer than the poorest.¹⁴⁴ To be sure, belief that poverty promotes health resonates in a plutocracy because it justifies the poor’s oppression. Yet in 2018, the world’s poorest countries by gross domestic product (GDP) per person—the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Uganda, Tajikistan, and Yemen—ranked near the bottom in e⁰.¹⁴⁵ Mozambique was 217th of 228 nations at 54.1 years at birth. Uganda ranked 213th at 54.7 years, and the DRC was 205th at 58.1 years. Of the five poorest nations, only Tajikistan and Yemen ranked above the 200 worst nations in e°. The richest countries—Qatar, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAB)—surpassed the poorest by decades.¹⁴⁶ The second richest, Singapore, ranked third in e° at 85.5 years. The other four occupied the top 100 countries while trailing Singapore’s e° over six years. Aggregate wealth does not guarantee longevity, especially given unequal distribution. In this regard, per person GDP is an inadequate measure because it hides inequalities by averaging wealth across a population.