219 Virgin Olive Oil Benefits tes, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece. The findings supported the hypothesis linking coronary heart disease with dietary cholesterol, and highlighted the cardioprotective effect of monounsaturated fats (olive oil). Subsequent studies not only confirmed these conclusions but also reinforced the importance of the “Mediterranean diet”. The descriptions of epidemiological, coronary heart disease, cholesterol, and monounsaturated fats can be found in other parts of the glossary. • As previously indicated, the terms are arranged in alphabetical order, both when individualised and when grouped within a topic. In a few cases, however, their natural or biological order has been prioritised over alphabetical order when certain concepts are closely related. • It should be noted that topics, as such, may not be fully developed, as they have been constructed solely from the technical words appearing in the chapters. Nevertheless, they are considerably supplemented with introductions to the topic and with expansions to the definitions of the terms, as well as with the incorporation and explanation, on repeated occasions, of other technical words that do not appear in the chapters but are related to the topic. • When Greek letters appear at the beginning of a term, it is arranged alphabetically according to the Latin part of the word. For example, Δ5-avenasterol is listed under “A” as avenasterol, or β-tocopherol under “T” as tocopherol. • In a few terms, links to web pages have been included; these were verified shortly before the publication of the book. In the digital version, if clicking directly on the link results in an error, copy the URL and paste it into a browser. • When the authors have included words or phrases in italics in the original manuscript, these appear in the chapters in a font that stands out from the one normally used, so as not to cause confusion with the meaning of italics (which are intended to mark the technical terms appearing in the chapters and described in the glossary). In the text shown below, the sentence in quotation marks is an example of what has just been explained: • Italics may also appear in bold when the author wishes to emphasise the word. In such cases, they carry a double meaning: the term is described in the glossary and the author highlights it within their chapter. • On occasion, a full description of a term has been included even though a simplified use of the term appears in the text of a chapter. • All definitions are written in an impersonal style, using the third person. Averroes (11th century), a philosopher and physician from Córdoba wrote in his Universal Treatise of Medicine: “When olive oil comes from ripe and healthy olives and its properties have not been artificially altered, it can be perfectly assimilated by the human constitution”. He also wrote about frying and the nutritional properties of olive oil:
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