The only people you'll ever see eating raw olives are growers who have desensitized themselves after years of experience (and even they usually only sample the fully-ripened black ones, which contain less oleuropein).
While olives are edible straight from the tree, they are intensely bitter. Olives contain oleuropein and phenolic compounds, which must be removed or, at least, reduced to make the olive palatable.
When eaten raw, olives are extremely bitter and, for all intents and purposes, completely inedible. Not only is the texture completely different from what you'll find after they've been processed (they're more mealy and mushy), they also contain a substance called oleuropein that makes them bitter.
Many people don't know that olives are actually inedible when they are first picked. Raw olives straight from the tree contain oleuropein, an extremely bitter compound that makes olives completely unpalatable. This is why, for many years, olives weren't eaten at all!
Raw olives are incredibly bitter, so once harvested they are cured and then usually preserved in salt or brine. The small, oval olive fruit has a flavour ranging from salty to mild and sweet.
Olives, like many other kinds of produce such as potatoes and sour cherries, just aren't something that you eat raw. Unprocessed, straight off the tree, they are bitter, very bitter, and the green ones even more so than ones which have fully ripened to black.
Forget buying olives in a jar
That's because the olives we enjoy are essentially pickles. Whether steeped in oil or a salt brine, olives only become truly edible after curing. The raw fruit is bursting with oleuropein, a bitter compound that must be removed prior to eating.
Nutrition. Olives are rich in vitamin E and other antioxidants, which may help reduce the risk of health conditions like cancer, diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. It's also an excellent source of: Vitamin A.
Olives are packed with antioxidants, which have been shown to help with chronic inflammation. Two kinds of antioxidants found in olives, hydroxytyrosol and oleanolic acid, have been effective in reducing inflammation in animal test subjects.
Harvested olives must be “cured” to remove the bitterness in order to make them palatable. The most common curing processes use brine, dry salt, water, or lye treatments. During these curing processes the water-soluble oleuropein compound is leached out of the olive flesh.
Olive pits are not poisonous. Many birds and other animals eat olives off the tree. The pits are primarily lignin, a major component of wood. If you ate one it would probably go through you undisturbed.
To this day traditional Hellenic medicine is still practised by the older generation mostly in villages across Greece. Raw olives were most likely eaten mixed with wine or vinegar for maximum nutrition as well.
To keep your saturated fat intake within the recommended guidelines, it's best to limit your intake to 2–3 ounces (56–84 grams) — about 16–24 small- to medium-sized olives — per day.
Jarred olives
Jarred green olives are an unripe, raw product, and jarred black olives are a half-ripe raw product, but both are processed the same as canned olives — lye cured, and the black olives are oxidized. The difference, however, comes down to how they are preserved.
According to the American Chemical Society (ACS), fresh olives contain an overwhelmingly bitter compound called oleuropein. This substance renders the stone fruit "absolutely disgusting" when eaten raw. While fresh olives are generally considered to be inedible, consuming one raw won't actually cause any harm.
Nutritional value: Both green olives and black olives are nutritious, but if you're looking for the healthiest olive option, green wins by a narrow margin. The reason is that green olives tend to be higher in polyphenols (antioxidants with anti-inflammatory benefits) than black olives.
Olives ... a superfood that you must include in your diet!!!
Foods with a high concentration of vitamins, nutrients, antioxidants and healthy fats are known as superfoods. They are very interesting foods due to their nutritional potential and the benefits they bring to our health if we include them in our diet.
Olives are an antioxidant-rich food. That means every time you eat them you send an army of good-guy neutralizers into your system to help those bad-guy free radicals chill out. Managing free radicals via intentional intake of antioxidants is a key part of healthy living and olives are a delicious way to do that.
For large olives, try using a knife and fork to cut the flesh off. If that doesn't seem to work, "take one bite around the pit, chew and swallow that bite, then place the remaining bit of the olive (pit included) into your mouth and chew around the pit," discarding the pit when finished.
Though olives are perfectly fine to consume straight from the jar, we recommend that you rinse them under cool water before serving. This removes most of the brine and sodium that coat the olive and can take away from the actual flavor. If you are watching your sodium intake rinsing is a must.
The whole industry switched to a new standard for the ripe California olive. “It has to be heated to 240 degrees. And only a can would tolerate that, physically—you couldn't do that with a glass jar.”
It is worth noting that food producers usually preserve olives in brine, which has a high salt content. Over time, excess levels of salt in the body can lead to high blood pressure, heart attacks, and stroke, so people should eat olives in moderation.
The olive purveyors over at Mezzetta recommend erring on the side of caution and consuming their olives within 12 months. That said, the best way to tell whether your olives are past their prime is simply to examine them for signs of spoilage.
They can cause diarrhea.
The high content of fat in green olives oil is known to trigger gastrointestinal problems and cause digestive disorders, such as diarrhea. When you consume them in huge amounts, your system would be unable to digest them completely, which normally results in minor to moderate diarrhea.