Objectives: To establish whether the ingestion of diets enriched with olive oil or high-oleic sunflower oil may produce changes in the composition of VLDL triacylglycerols from hypertensive patients. It could be relevant for the uptake and metabolism of triacylglycerol-derived metabolites by extrahepatic tissues.
Design: Patients were assigned to the diets in a random-order sequence.
Subjects: The participants were 24 hypertensive patients recruited from a religious community.
Interventions: The study was conducted over two four week periods with a four week washout period between both MUFA diets.
Results: Dietary olive oil kept in balance the content of saturated fatty acids and decreased the content of arachidonic acid in VLDL triacylglycerols. HOSO diet reduced the content of palmitic acid and increased the content of linoleic acid. There was also a decrease in trioleate-glycerol and an increase in tripalmitate-glycerol of VLDL after the MUFA diets, but these effects were more pronounced in the HOSO group. Intake of olive oil decreased the content of disaturated triacylglycerols and increased the content of dioleate-containing triacylglycerols. A decrease in palmitate-dioleate-glycerol after dietary HOSO was observed. Olive oil (but not HOSO) promoted the presence of long-chain PUFA of n-3 family at the sn-2 position of VLDL triacylglycerols.
Conclusions: Our data indicate that olive oil and HOSO, providing a similar concentration of MUFA (oleic acid), differ in the formation of VLDL triacylglycerols in hypertensive patients.