Antioxidant and other biological activities of olive mill waste waters

During olive oil production, large volumes of water are generated and subse quently discarded. Olives contain a variety of bioactive components, and so me of them, according to their partition coefficients, end up in the water phase. The current investigation aimed at comparing different methods for t he extraction of biologically active components of the olive mill waste wat ers (OMWW) and evaluating the in vitro antioxidant and anti-inflammatory ac tivities of the resulting extracts. The results indicate that OMWW extracts are able to inhibit human LDL oxidation (a process involved in the pathoge nesis of atherosclerosis) and to scavenge superoxide anions and hypochlorou s acid at concentrations as low as 20 ppm. Finally, two of the three extrac ts also inhibited the production of leukotrienes by human neutrophils. The potency of the extracts depended on their degree of refinement: extracts co ntaining only low molecular weight phenols were the most effective.