Who saw 60 Minutes earlier this year about the olive oil special?

For those of you who didn’t, $16 billion a year to the Italian mafia. I’ve got a lot of cousins in the mafia. It’s $16 billion. It is rampant with fraud.

60 Minutes said about 80% of olive oil in the U.S. is adulterated. What do they adulterate it with?

They adulterate it with…

No, not usually. It’s usually another vegetable. It’s usually sunflower or safflower, because the density of those oils is closer to the olive oil. And they get away with it, and it’s as cheap as can be.

Not only are they bad oils that will make us sick, but remember, it’s processed. So it actually is pretty toxic. The investigative journalists in the book suggest that over 90%, perhaps as much as 95% of the olive oil in the U.S. is adulterated.

You can almost be guaranteed at your grocery store that it’s all garbage. Almost guaranteed. There are stores, like artisan places. In California, they grow some incredible… Rather, they harvest and produce some incredible olive oil. There’s no question. It might be some of the best in the world. Otherwise, I think it comes from Italy. That’s why they kind of bastardized the brand.

You’ve just got to be careful. I mean, the book, too. I’ve got olive trees, and they’ve been having harvests for a while. They’re smaller than I’d like them to be at this point, but there are still tens of thousands of olives that just drop to the ground. I didn’t have the time to figure out how to convert them into an olive that I would eat.

Turns out, you don’t do that. I learned in the book that to create olive oil is a very time-consuming process, to create high-quality olive oil. Because you have to harvest it literally within one day. So it has to be monitored continuously. Then after you harvest it, you have to press that olive within an hour. So you can imagine the logistics and the manual labor that goes into that. That’s why olive oil is so expensive. It’s an incredible health food if you get it from the right source. But you’re going to have to pay top dollar to get good olive oil. You’re not going to get it at the store. Even if it says extra virgin, it’s irrelevant. Again, there is no enforcement of these standards.

So enough of the bad news. I thought I’d give you guys a little bit of cheer. I don’t want you to say, “Oh, Mercola’s getting… What did he look like in high school?”

Who wants to see what I looked like in high school?

All right. I know. I know. Getting old is hell. You know?

Now obviously the guy’s fit, and he’s exercising. That’s another way you increase your… Mitochondrial biogenesis is a fancy word for increasing your mitochondrial growth, which is what you want to do.

Your mitochondria are your power plants, the power houses of your cells. They create energy. Really, my new book is all about helping you understand how to improve your mitochondrial health. Really, we are moving in that direction. It’s all going to be about mitochondrial health.

These glasses are about mitochondrial health. And next year when I come back to speak, I’m hoping half of you will be wearing these.