Why You Should Be Using Olive Oil Every Single Day

There's a version of good olive oil that lives in a lot of Australian kitchens as a special occasion ingredient. It sits in the cupboard, brought out for dinner parties or a nice salad, used sparingly because it feels too good — or too expensive — for everyday cooking.

This is exactly backwards.

The case for using genuinely good olive oil every single day — liberally, habitually, without reservation — is one of the strongest arguments in food. Not just for flavour, though that's reason enough. But for health, for cooking simplicity, and for the cumulative effect of eating well over a lifetime.

Here's why daily olive oil use is one of the best habits you can build in a kitchen.

The Daily Fat Decision

Every day, in almost every meal, you make a decision about fat. What you cook in, what you dress with, what you finish dishes with at the table. These decisions seem small in isolation. Over months and years, they shape what you eat more than almost any other choice.

Most Australians default to a mix of butter, vegetable oils, and olive oil — often reaching for whichever is most convenient rather than most considered. Butter for toast and baking. A neutral oil for high-heat cooking. Olive oil when the recipe specifically calls for it.

The simplest upgrade to this pattern is also the most impactful: make extra virgin olive oil the default fat for almost everything. Not just when a recipe asks for it. Every day, every meal, every time fat is needed.

What Happens When You Use It Daily

Your food tastes better. This is the most immediate effect and the most convincing argument. Olive oil — particularly fresh, high-polyphenol oil like Olio Nuovo — adds flavour that neutral oils don't. Not just richness, but complexity. Grassiness, pepper, fruitiness. These qualities lift simple food in ways that canola or sunflower oil simply can't.

You absorb more nutrients from vegetables. Fat-soluble vitamins — A, D, E, and K — require dietary fat for absorption. Vegetables eaten with olive oil deliver more of their nutritional value than vegetables eaten without fat, or with minimal fat. This is not a marginal effect. It's a meaningful one, particularly if vegetables form a significant part of your diet.

You build a genuine flavour habit. Daily use of good olive oil recalibrates your palate. You start noticing when food is finished well and when it isn't. You develop a sense of what dishes need — when more oil would help, when lemon should accompany it, when it should be used raw rather than cooked. This is how good cooks develop their instincts.

You get the cumulative health benefits. The health effects associated with olive oil — particularly the anti-inflammatory and cardiovascular benefits linked to polyphenols — are dietary and cumulative. They build over time with consistent consumption. A tablespoon of olive oil taken occasionally as a supplement won't do much. Daily use as the primary fat in your cooking is what the research reflects.

How Much Is Enough

Traditional Mediterranean consumption of olive oil is higher than most Australians would consider normal. In rural Crete — the population whose diet formed the basis of much of the original Mediterranean diet research — daily olive oil consumption was estimated at several tablespoons per person, per day.

This is not oil rationed carefully over salads. It's oil used generously throughout every meal — to cook vegetables, to dress legumes, to finish pasta, to pour over bread. Fat was not the enemy. Cheap fat was never an option. Good oil, used freely, was simply how food was made.

You don't need to match traditional Cretan consumption to see benefits. But if you currently use olive oil sparingly, increasing your daily use — particularly of fresh, high-polyphenol oil — is one of the simplest positive dietary changes available to you.

Breaking the Rationing Habit

The instinct to ration good olive oil comes from its cost relative to cheaper fats. A bottle of genuinely good fresh harvest oil costs more than a litre of vegetable oil. That price difference creates a psychological barrier to using it freely.

There are two ways to think about this.

The first is practical: olive oil used generously and daily, at even a premium price point, adds relatively little to the cost of feeding a household compared to almost any other quality upgrade you could make. A bottle of Olio Nuovo used over two to three weeks costs less per day than a single takeaway coffee.

The second is philosophical: the whole point of good olive oil is how it tastes and what it does for food. An excellent oil used sparingly, treated as too precious to actually use, delivers almost none of its value. The oil is meant to be used. Generously. Daily. That is the purpose it was made for.

Simple Daily Uses Worth Building Into Habit

Morning. Drizzle over toast instead of butter. Pour over scrambled or fried eggs before serving. Add to porridge with a pinch of salt — unusual but genuinely good.

Lunch. Dress any salad with fresh oil and lemon or vinegar. Drizzle over tinned fish or sardines on toast. Finish a bowl of soup at the table.

Dinner. Use as the cooking fat for any vegetable, whether roasted, sautéed, or steamed. Finish pasta off the heat with a pour of fresh oil. Pour generously over grilled fish or chicken before serving.

Snacking. Good bread with good oil and salt is a complete and satisfying snack. So is a piece of good cheese with oil drizzled over it.

None of these require recipes. They require only the habit of reaching for the oil.

One Bottle at a Time

Building a daily olive oil habit works best when the oil is genuinely good — when reaching for it is a pleasure rather than a neutral act.

This is part of why we think fresh harvest oil matters so much for daily use. Olio Nuovo at its peak is an oil you want to use. Its flavour is assertive enough to be noticeable, its complexity interesting enough to pay attention to. Using it daily keeps you connected to what you're eating in a way that a neutral, flavourless cooking fat never can.

Start with one bottle. Use it freely over two to three weeks. Notice what it does to the food you make with it.

Then see whether you want to go back to the way things were before.

Join the Olio Nuovo Club — fresh harvest olive oil from the Macedon Ranges, delivered direct to your door →

Gold — Royal Tasmanian Fine Food Awards 2025. Gold — Dubai Olive Oil Competition 2025.