Is Drinking Olive Oil Good for You? An Honest Look at the Wellness Shot Trend

Somewhere in the past few years, drinking a shot of olive oil became a thing. You can find it on TikTok in the morning routine videos. Bryan Johnson includes it in his Blueprint stack. Longevity-focused podcasters mention it. People who would never have considered swallowing a tablespoon of oil five years ago are now doing it every morning and posting about how their skin looks better.

So the question — which we get from customers all the time — is whether this is actually doing anything, or whether the wellness internet has invented a ritual out of something that doesn't quite earn it.

I'll give you my honest take, which is going to disappoint some people. Drinking olive oil straight isn't a hack. It isn't superior to cooking with it. The mechanism people imagine — some special concentrated dose your body absorbs better because it's not mixed with food — isn't really how digestion works. The benefits of olive oil consumption are real, but they come from the oil itself, not the delivery method. A tablespoon you swallow on an empty stomach and a tablespoon you stir into your morning eggs end up doing almost the same thing once they're in your system.

The trend exists in part because it makes for good content and in part because it gives brands another reason to tell you to buy their bottle. If a single shot of olive oil is medicine, then ordering a second case of it feels justified. The reality is more boring, and also more useful.

What the research actually says about olive oil consumption

The strongest research on olive oil and human health — the PREDIMED trial out of Spain, follow-on studies on cardiovascular outcomes, the body of work on polyphenols and inflammation — measures cumulative daily consumption. The trial dose was about four tablespoons a day, used in cooking, dressings, and bread, as it would be in a Mediterranean kitchen.

None of those studies tested "drinking olive oil on an empty stomach in the morning" as a separate variable. The benefits being claimed by the wellness shot crowd are mostly extrapolated from research that was looking at olive oil consumption in any form. If you read the actual papers, the protocol is just: eat olive oil, generously, every day, for years. Where it sits in your meal plan doesn't really matter to the outcome.

The thing that does matter, in a way the wellness internet rarely acknowledges, is what's in the bottle. The cardiovascular and longevity findings the trend cites were measured using high-quality extra virgin olive oil. Fresh, polyphenol-rich, properly stored, with real bite at the back of the throat. I wrote a whole piece about why most American supermarket olive oil isn't that, and the short version is: if you're doing a shot of mass-market grocery-store EVOO every morning, you're not actually getting most of what the studies were measuring. The polyphenols aren't there to deliver the benefits.

What I actually do — and what I'd recommend instead

I don't take a morning shot of olive oil. I never have. The way I get olive oil into my body looks more like the Mediterranean home cooks I grew up around — it's in everything, generously, all day, but it's not a ritual you have to remember.

One thing I do most summer mornings: I cut up a tomato (ripe, in season, ideally from a farmer's market or my own garden), put it on a plate, squeeze half a lemon over it, hit it with good flaky salt, and pour a real amount of olive oil over the whole thing. Not a drizzle. Several tablespoons. Then I toast a bagel and eat it alongside, dragging it through the oil on the plate.

By the end of breakfast I've gotten more olive oil into me than a single shot, in a form that actually tastes like something, paired with food that makes the oil land better, with none of the "I am performing wellness for the camera" feel of swallowing a spoonful straight from a bottle. The benefits are the same. The experience is much better.

You can do the same thing in twenty other configurations. Yogurt with a generous pour on top. Eggs scrambled with two tablespoons of oil. Toast and oil, full stop. Salad with twice as much olive oil as you usually use. The frame I'd suggest: pick a few daily moments where olive oil is the flavor anchor, and lean into them. Don't drink the oil in a ritual. Use the oil in a meal.

One personal habit I do drink olive oil for, with caveats

There's one situation where I do swallow olive oil straight, and I want to be careful about how I describe it because it isn't medical advice and I'm not a doctor.

Before nights where I know I'm going to be drinking hard alcohol, I'll have a small amount of olive oil straight. I started doing this years ago because my stomach doesn't love hard liquor on its own, and the folk wisdom in some Mediterranean cultures is that olive oil coats the stomach and slows alcohol absorption. Anecdotally, it seems to work for me — I feel less queasy the next morning, less reflux during the night, less of the "why did I do that to myself" feeling.

The science on this is mixed and I'd be lying if I told you there's a slam-dunk study saying it works. There's some research suggesting fatty foods (including olive oil) slow gastric emptying, which would in theory delay alcohol absorption modestly. There's also research saying the effect is small. What I can tell you is that I do it, it feels like it helps me personally, and I am sharing this as a personal practice, not a recommendation. If you're considering it, ask your own doctor. If you have any kind of gallbladder or fatty liver issue, definitely ask your doctor. Don't take medical guidance from an olive oil article on the internet.

I include this only because someone is going to read the rest of the article and assume "Berk never drinks olive oil straight." I do, occasionally, for that one specific reason. The morning wellness shot, though, isn't something I do.

The bigger thing nobody in the wellness space is saying

The question of whether to drink olive oil or use it in food is genuinely small compared to a different question that almost no one in the trend space takes seriously: where did the olive oil you're drinking come from?

There's an entire category now of celebrity-branded and wellness-branded olive oils — bottles attached to a famous name, a longevity protocol, an influencer. Some of these brands actually source carefully. Many of them are mystery products. They don't own a grove or run a mill, they didn't pick the olives, and the closest they got to the harvest was approving the label design. The oil itself was bought in bulk from a supply chain partner, decanted into a designer bottle, and given a story for the back label.

If you're going to drink a tablespoon of olive oil straight on an empty stomach every morning, the actual provenance of that oil is the thing you should care most about. The most discussed example right now is Bryan Johnson's brand, where the answer to "who farmed this, who pressed it, when, where, and at what acidity" is harder to find than it should be. That's not a personal attack on him. That's a sourcing-transparency point, and it applies to most celebrity-fronted olive oil brands. If a brand can't tell you, in detail, who grew the olives and who pressed them, the wellness ritual you're performing with their oil is mostly performance.

This is the part I'd argue is the actual content of the question "is drinking olive oil good for you." It's good for you if the olive oil is good. It's a waste of a tablespoon if the oil is degraded, blended, or from a supply chain no one can explain.

What to look for in an oil worth drinking

If you do want to drink olive oil — straight, in coffee, by the spoonful, however — the same things you'd want in an oil you cook with apply. Just more so, because you're going to taste it without anything else to hide behind.

A real harvest date on the bottle, ideally within the last six to twelve months. Single-origin sourcing from one farm or one region, not "bottled in Italy" boilerplate. Dark glass or tin packaging. Acidity under 0.4% (under 0.2% is excellent). Polyphenol content above 250 mg/kg if disclosed; above 400 mg/kg is genuinely high. The bite at the back of your throat when you swallow — that peppery cough is the polyphenols. If it isn't there, the oil isn't going to do what the studies say olive oil does.

Our Early Harvest tests at 550 mg/kg in polyphenols, partly because of how we dry-farm the grove on Mount Latmos. The trees are stressed (no irrigation, mountain soil) and stressed trees produce more antioxidants as a survival mechanism. Those antioxidants end up in the fruit, and then in the oil. I covered this in our piece on olive oil and the Mediterranean diet — it's the part of the equation the wellness shot crowd skips, and it's the part that actually determines whether the morning ritual is worth anything.

How much, when, and what to expect if you do drink it

If after all this you still want to do the wellness shot thing, here's what I'd suggest as a sane version of it.

Start with one tablespoon, not two. Drink it at whatever time fits your day — morning is fine, evening is fine, the timing claims around "before bed" or "on an empty stomach" don't have strong evidence behind them. Notice the throat sensation. If it's nothing, your oil is probably the problem. If it's a real cough-inducing pepper, you've got the right oil and you can decide how often you want to repeat the practice.

For most people, one to two tablespoons a day is plenty, total across cooking and consumption. Beyond about four tablespoons you're adding meaningful calories without proportional additional benefit. The PREDIMED dose was around four tablespoons a day for high-cardiovascular-risk subjects. If you're healthy, two is more than enough.

Don't expect miracles. Olive oil isn't an energy hack. It won't make you sleep better in any dramatic way. The benefits accumulate over years of daily consumption — that's how the longevity research found them — not over a week of TikTok-worthy shots.

Where I'd land

Drinking olive oil is fine if you want to. It's also unnecessary. If you currently use olive oil in your cooking and you eat it daily, you're already getting essentially everything the morning shot people are claiming. The variable that moves the needle is the quality of the oil, not whether you swallow it solo or pour it on your tomatoes.

Use the bottle in a way you enjoy. Make a tomato salad in the summer with twice as much olive oil as you think you need. Drag bread through a generous pour before dinner. Put olive oil on yogurt for breakfast. Cook your eggs in two tablespoons of oil instead of a knob of butter. Dress your salad with more oil than you usually would. The actual cooking and eating of food is more rewarding than swallowing a tablespoon from a measuring spoon, and your body doesn't know the difference between the two.

And if you do want to optimize the ritual: spend less energy thinking about the timing of when you drink it and more energy figuring out whose oil you're drinking in the first place. Question the brand. Look for a real harvest date, a real origin, a real number on the acidity, a real cough at the back of your throat. The rest is performance.

— Berk Bahceci, Co-Founder