Olives nourish you from the inside out, like yogurt.

For ten years, a Catalan yogurt brand has used the slogan "It all starts within" to refer to the nutritional benefits of consuming their products. And it's true, yogurts are fermented foods, and eating them improves your gut microbiota, making it strong and thriving, like a dense green forest. The denser the microbiota, the better, because viruses won't be able to penetrate it and, therefore, won't harm the gut. The good news is that we could have carried out the same campaign with olives from our olive groves. Olives, like yogurts, kefirs, cheeses, gherkins, pickled foods, and pickles in general, are fermented foods and, therefore, provide billions of active bacteria to our bodies.

But let's take it step by step. What is a fermented food? It's a food that has undergone a maturation period, preserved in vinegar, or subjected to a transformation of state (like cheese), and it's during this time that beneficial bacteria appear. If we have olive trees, from November to January or February we harvest olives and macerate them with water, salt (fifteen grams per liter of water), and aromatic herbs for a few months; then we'll have a fermented food. In nutrition, they'll call it... probiotic"Probiotic" is a word that indicates a food provides bacteria to the gut flora. If, on the other hand, we buy olives, to ensure they are the nutritional powerhouse we're talking about, we must check the label to make sure they haven't been pasteurized. If they have undergone the process invented by the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, they will still be fermented, but not beneficial in the sense we're describing, because the heat of pasteurization will have killed the bacteria. They will have become a food with a long shelf life, but not a probiotic. And if you're someone who experiments with recipes and has ever heated olives in a pan, be aware that you will have also destroyed the bacteria present in the olives. That's why bread, despite being made with fermented sourdough, is not a probiotic, because the heat of the oven, at over 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees Fahrenheit), kills them.

Beer and wines, fermented but with alcohol

We continue with the word fermentedWe all associate it with other foods: beer, wine, sparkling wine. Drinking is part of our culture, our landscape, and supporting our country's economy, but we don't drink good bacteria, even in fermented beverages, because they contain alcohol. In contrast, kombucha tea, with its low alcohol content, offers the same benefits to the gut microbiota as olives or yogurt.

In nutrition, fermented foods are so highly recommended that nutritionists, like Anna Grífols, claim they have "the ability to prevent disease because they coat the intestines, so any pathogens that might enter bounce off and don't penetrate." In other words, eating fermented foods protects the intestinal villi (which are often metaphorically described as the green forest lining them). If, in addition to eating olives, we also eat vegetables, fruit, and legumes, we develop a strong gut flora, prepared to fight off viruses or intestinal illnesses.

In short, with our olives we could start making ads like this: a woman or a man sits on a sofa. White background. White sofa. Cotton clothing. A sense of cleanliness. The camera focuses on the individual, who opens the lid of a jar of olives. You hear the pop of the lid opening. With a small spoon, delicately, they take an olive. They bring it to their mouth, chew it. They remove the pit and place it on a small plate. A white, light-colored plate. And they say: "It all starts on the inside." As they say this, they should gently touch their stomach with their right hand while smiling at the camera. Fade to black, with letters that read: "Our olives have one billion active bacteria." The End.