MOROCCO

Your cholesterol crept up after menopause, the way it often does.
Morocco eats an oil that, swapped for butter, lowered it in a trial.

Argan oil (culinary)  ·  Argania spinosa  ·  Mechanism: unsaturated fats, sterols

Argan oil is pressed from the kernels of the argan tree, Argania spinosa, which grows almost nowhere on earth but the semi-arid southwest of Morocco, where it anchors the whole landscape. The tree is so central there that the region is a protected biosphere, and the sight of goats climbing its branches to reach the fruit is a local commonplace.

The culinary oil is made from kernels that are roasted before pressing, which gives it a deep, toasted, nutty flavor quite unlike the pale, raw-pressed cosmetic version. It is drizzled over couscous and vegetables, used as a dip for warm bread, and blended with almonds and honey into a rich spread called amlou.

Its production has long been the work of Amazigh, or Berber, communities, and today much of it runs through women's cooperatives in the Souss region. The oil is expensive because the process is slow, with each hard kernel cracked largely by hand, one at a time.

In Morocco the edible oil and the cosmetic oil are simply two different products pressed from the same tree. Only one of them was ever meant to be eaten, and only that roasted, culinary one was studied for what it does inside the body.

Argan oil is mostly unsaturated fat, with oleic and linoleic acids making up the bulk, plus an unusually high load of vitamin E and a set of plant sterols unlike those in olive oil. That is exactly the kind of profile that tends to improve blood lipids when it takes the place of saturated fat like butter or ghee.

In a small human trial, adults with high cholesterol who swapped butter for about two tablespoons of argan oil a day saw meaningful drops in total and LDL cholesterol over three weeks, and observational studies of regular Moroccan consumers point the same way over years. A meta-analysis pooling these small trials found a consistent, if modest, benefit to the lipid profile.

The West put argan in shampoo. Morocco puts it on breakfast.

The honest framing is that much of this is what any good unsaturated oil does when it displaces butter, helped along by argan's sterols, which blunt cholesterol absorption, and its antioxidants, which slow the oxidation of LDL. The trials are small and mostly Moroccan, so treat argan as a worthy oil in that family rather than a cholesterol drug in a bottle, which it plainly is not.

The how-to

The catch is buying the kind you can actually eat, not the kind sold for your hair.

You want culinary or food-grade argan oil, pressed from roasted kernels, sold at North African and Middle Eastern grocers, specialty shops, and online, usually fifteen to twenty-five dollars for a small bottle. It should smell toasted and nutty and say edible or culinary on the label, since cosmetic argan is unroasted and not meant for eating.
Use it raw as a finishing oil rather than for high-heat cooking, drizzled over vegetables, grains, soup, or bread, or stirred into a dip, at roughly a tablespoon or two a day in place of butter. The trial that moved cholesterol used about two tablespoons daily, swapped in for saturated fat.
Expect a modest lipid improvement from trading butter for an unsaturated, antioxidant-rich oil, not a dramatic overnight change. A good extra-virgin olive oil does much of the same job for less money, so treat argan as a flavorful option in that family.
It is a food and safe for most people, but it is a seed oil from a tree, so approach with care if you have nut or seed allergies. And treat high cholesterol as something to manage with your doctor, since an oil swap supports medication and diet rather than replacing them.

Tomorrow: Sri Lanka and true cinnamon
why most of what America calls cinnamon is a different, riskier bark.

See you then.